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.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"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
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.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below 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. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... 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).