Joel Guzmán via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Joel Guzmán:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Joel Guzmán
- City: Austin, Texas
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Joel Guzmán grew up playing conjunto in his father’s band in Washington state, to where his family had relocated in the 1950s. Over the years he played with the greats, including Santiago Almeida and Flaco Jiménez.
Guzmán returned to Texas in the 1980s and spent the next three decades—along with singer-songwriter and longtime collaborator Sarah Fox — pushing the boundaries of Tex-Mex music. The bilingual Austin duo still play conjunto, but they also blend it with jazz, blues, and country, plus the tropical sounds of cumbia and salsa. They often record and perform with other top artists, ranging from Joe Ely and Rickie Lee Jones to Buddy Miller and Lee Ann Womack.
Guzmán won Grammys for 1998’s Los Super Seven and 2004’s Polkas, Gritos y Acordeones albums, plus another for the 2010 soundtrack of Crazy Heart, a film in which he also acted.
At 56 Joel Guzmán plays and promotes the accordion with passion. He teaches accordion workshops around the country and hosts the annual Squeezebox Mania, an Austin celebration of all things accordion. He also directs the University of Texas at Austin’s Tex-Mex Conjunto Ensemble.
“My musical roots reach back to the beginnings of conjunto,” Guzmán says. “It’s my duty to act as a bridge between past and future.”
Contact Information
- Email: guzmanfox59@gmail.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: joelguzman
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCzAUPE927msmcAdMcVkVpTA
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/6H29VghWu6GXPWKZoDOan5
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/0xrz8zlwGULza9YGd5DIPK
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/1eXCUbnO3Q4EmB9CxX1SaM
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/6mpQu58RaU9UUar6ZLjP7Y
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
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. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
