Bio:
Born on September 17th, 1963 in Santa Cruz, CA, Jeff Ballard’s musical inspiration and drive was sparked by listening to musical legends ranging from Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. His exposure to multiple genres of music and the types of playing required for each enabled him to develop his foundation and understanding of music and planted the seeds from which his own varied approach to playing grew.
Ballard began playing drums at the age of 14 and while attending community college, began the journey of being a musician, playing in college ensembles and gigs around Santa Cruz and the Northern California region. While making the rounds as a working drummer, he delved deep into the modern jazz catalogue soaking up the language of classic innovative jazz groups. Listening to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, added to his own toolkit with the sonic palettes created by the drum legends who played in these groups: Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, and Billy Higgins.
At the age of 25, Ballard began an educational journey no college could match. He went on the road for eight months annually from 1988 to 1990 with Ray Charles, backing one of music’s biggest stars, perfecting his time feels and tempos from playing with Charles nightly on the bandstand for three years.
In 1990 Ballard moved to New York and jumped into the transformative scene that was developing there at the time. He began collaborating with Kurt Rosenwinkel, Brad Mehldau, Mark Turner, Joshua Redman, and Ben Allison, among others who were mixing jazz tradition with their own influences, ranging from Middle Eastern rhythms to electronica and modern hip hop.
Ballard’s past and present recording sessions and touring associates read like a who’s who of jazz. To name a select few: Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Joshua Redman, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Brad Mehldau. His present work continues with the Brad Mehldau Trio, as co-leader of collective group FLY (featuring Mark Turner, Ballard, and Larry Grenadier) and with his own groups The Jeff Ballard Trio and Jeff Ballard Fairgrounds. In 2014 The Jeff Ballard Trio with Lionel Loueke and Miguel Zenon released their debut album, Time's Tales, on Sony/OKeh Records. On January 25th, 2019 the group, Jeff Ballard Fairgrounds, will release their debut album entitled Fairgrounds on Edition Records. This album presents music recorded and selected from a tour in March 2015. The music is filled with wide-open improvisations and originals touching on the blues, rock and roll, electronica, and RB. It can have the funkiest grooves or a meditative minimalistic space, or it can go all the way over and outside to the unexpected world of free jazz, thus confirming Ballard as one of the most stylistically diverse drummers on the scene.
Contact Information
Management/Booking:
BOOKING
TEMA MUSIC
Enrico Lubatti: +39 347 5744516
Angel Mas: +34 615 989387
E: [email protected]
LABEL
EDITION RECORDS
Record Label: Dave Stapleton
E: [email protected]
Public Relations: Mike Gavin
E: [email protected]
T: +44 (0)7714 239758
www.editionrecords.com
The canopy rises from Bahia to encircle the planet, but but the roots of the Matrix go back decades to Kingston, Jamaica...
I'm Sparrow. I used the contract above, Bob Marley's first (co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21, and this is a copy I made of Clement Dodd's original) to retrieve unpaid royalties from CBS Records. I retrieved money for Aretha Franklin, Gilberto Gil, Led Zeppelin, Barbra Streisand, Mongo Santamaria and many others. But what if Bob hadn't got out of Kingston, or Aretha out of Chicago? They would have been just as great but there would have been no way for the wider world to know. The world brims with brilliant artists without reach, including writers, filmmakers, painters... So in the Matrix, everybody can potentially be experienced from everywhere in the world. And the famous? Very few people (Bob and Michael Jackson aside) are famous everywhere, plus the famous like to recommend (connect to) too. The pathways are open. As they say in Bahia, "Laroyê!"
Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix. — Susan Rogers (Susan was personal recording engineer for Prince; she recorded "Purple Rain", "Around the World in a Day", "Parade", and "Sign o' the Times" and she is now director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory)
Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched! — Julian Lloyd Webber (Julian is the most highly renowned cellist in the United Kingdom; he is brother of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats...)
This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :))) — Clarice Assad (Clarice is a pianist and composer, with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world)
The Matrix uncoils from the Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history and from where some of the most physically and spiritually uplifting music ever made (samba and its precursor chula, per the Saturno Brothers below) evolved...
By the same mathematics positioning some 8 billion human beings within some 6 or so steps of each other, people in the Matrix tend to within close, accessible steps of everybody else inside the Matrix.
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn.
Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.
Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — the hand drum in the opening scene above — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).
Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.
SPARROW/PARDAL ROBERTS
SUSAN ROGERS
JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER
CLARICE ASSAD
ALICIA SVIGALS
KAMASI WASHINGTON