Bio:
For many Canadian music fans, the name Joanna Majoko is a familiar one: the Toronto-based vocalist, composer, and bandleader has established a reputation as one of Canada’s most exciting young singers. Majoko has been a regular presence on the bandstand with some of the country’s top musicians, including Jane Bunnett and Maqueque, David Clayton-Thomas, of Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Larnell Lewis, of Snarky Puppy. She has performed at some of the world’s biggest festivals, such as the Montreal Jazz Festival, France’s Jazz sur son 31 Festival, and Switzerland’s Internationales Jazz festival Bern, where she participated in a week-long residency with Maqueque. Majoko has also been the recipient of a number of notable accolades, including Jazz Artist of the Year at the 2019 ByBlacks People’s Choice Awards, major grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council, and FACTOR, and has been a master class artist at Humber College and the University of Toronto.
Born in Germany to German and Zimbabwean parents, Majoko spent the majority of her childhood in Zimbabwe, where she grew up speaking Shona and German and participating in choirs, musicals, drum ensembles, and traditional Zimbabwean dance groups. From Zimbabwe, Majoko moved briefly to South Africa; then, at the age of fourteen, she and her family moved to Manitoba. It was at the University of Manitoba that Majoko would become immersed in jazz, and would hone her skills as a vocalist, composer, and bandleader. Later, a move to Toronto would prove to be the catalyst for the next stage of her career. In Toronto’s rich, multi-faceted musical community, Majoko found a steady stream of festivals, radio stations, and club programmers who were eager to hear her voice, both as a guest vocalist and with her own successful group. Majoko has been a fixture at the Toronto Jazz Festival, on Jazz FM, at clubs such as The Rex and Poetry, and at major venues, including the Harbourfront Centre and the Canadian Opera Company’s Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. In addition to her talents as a vocalist, composer, and arranger, Majoko has expanded her skills as a multi-instrumentalist, developing a sense of advanced rhythmic independence by incorporating the caxixi and claves into her performance practice. This year, she adds another important entry to her list of accomplishments: the release of her debut EP, No Holding Back.
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).