CURATION
-
from this page:
by Augmented Matrix
Network Node
-
Name:
Jeff Tang
-
City/Place:
Brooklyn, NY
-
Country:
United States
Life & Work
-
Bio:
Jeff Tang is a composer and creative producer whose practice is rooted in a deep delight in the cross-pollination of artistic disciplines, a dedication to the redirection of the cultural narrative, and an ambition to re-center historically underrepresented voices and values in the arts.
As a composer, his music theater work has been seen in New York, London, Minneapolis, and Chicago. Commissions include NYC's Leviathan Lab, the NYU Write/Act Festival, Music Institute of Chicago, Theatre Latte Da in Minneapolis, St. Ann's School in Brooklyn. He’s scored podcasts for Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, and Rainn Wilson’s SoulPancake, as well as for People’s Action Network. Jeff has been a Summer Labs Artist in Residence at National Sawdust, a Composition Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and an alumnus of the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, Prospect Theater Company's Musical Theater Lab, and the PlayLabs Festival at the Playwrights Center.
As creative producer, credits include as Executive Creative Producer for Iphigenia, a new opera, currently in development, by jazz icons Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding, with set designs by the architect Frank Gehry; and as lead producer for composer Mason Bates’s genre-bending KC Jukebox series at the Kennedy Center. For virtual audiences, he produced Sound Heals, the official launch event for the Sound Health Network; The Heart of the Song for The Dallas Opera, featuring the music and stories of a trio of star tenors from Mexico; and with Lumahai Productions, he produced the pilot episode for Active Hope, a virtual event and podcast series created with The Apollo Theater, The Kennedy Center, and National Sawdust.
As the Associate Producer for the NationalSawdust+: performance and conversation series in Brooklyn, he’s worked with poets, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, mixologists, and jugglers, and his previous role at the Metropolitan Opera saw him on the producing team for the award-winning international Live in HD and radio broadcasts, and as a catalyst for public programming, audience engagement, and social impact.
He serves on the Equity Committee of the newly-formed Creative & Independent Producer Alliance (CIPA), and is a proud member of Peoplmovr, a creative studio specializing in involvement that centers anti-racism and equity in its commitment to collective liberation.
Predictably, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Clips (more may be added)
"In a small world great things are possible."
In this matrix it's not which pill you take, it's which pathways you take, pathways originating in the sprawling cultural matrix of Brazil: Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, European, Asian... Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, delineated by the Bay of All Saints, earthly center of gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings — and the sublimity they created — presided over by the ineffable Black Rome of Brazil: Salvador da Bahia.
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano Veloso, son of the Recôncavo, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Caetano Veloso
THE MATRIX MISSION: What do Jimmy Cliff, Jimmy Page, and Dionne Warwick all have in common? They've all lived in Bahia and Dionne is moving back (visitors include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spike Lee, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, David Byrne and Sting, among others). But so have lived and now live untold numbers of Bahian creators whose magisterial work has never had the major media means to reach beyond limited surroundings. In order that the creators of Bahia might have global reach, all creators must have global reach.
QED: 'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
Susan Rogers
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze: manager, Kamasi Washington
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad: Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd-Webber: UK's premier cellist; brother of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals: World's premier klezmer violinist
Developed here in the Historic Center of Salvador da Bahia ↓ .
Bule Bule (Assis Valente)
"♫ The time has come for these bronzed people to show their value..."
Recommend somebody and you will appear on that person's page. Somebody recommends you and they will appear on your page.
Both pulled by the inexorable mathematical gravity of the small world phenomenon to within range of everybody inside.
And by logical extension, to within range of all humanity outside as well.
8 billion human beings tend to within six degrees of connection to each other.
In a small world great things are possible.
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
I built the Matrix below (I'm below left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian. If you create too, join them in the Matrix.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.