Bio:
John Zorn was born September 2, 1953 in NYC and has been in touch with the creative environment of downtown New York most of his life. Drawing on his experience in a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular and improvised music, John Zorn has created an influential body of work that defies academic categories.
He has been a central figure in the dowtown scene since 1975, incorporating a wide range of musicians in various compositional formats, his experimental work in rock and jazz with the bands NAKED CITY, PAINKILLER and MASADA earning him a large cult following.
His early inspirations include American innovators [Ives, Varèse, Cage, Carter and Partch], the European tradition of [Berg, Stravinsky, Ligeti, Boulez and Kagel], soundtrack composers [Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone and Carl Stalling], avant-garde filmmakers such as [Harry Smith, Jack Smith, Kennet Anger, Stan Brakhage and Jean-Luc Godard], Ontological-Hysteric Theater director [Richard Foreman], experimental rock and jazz as well as avant garde theater, film, art and literature.
He established the Tzadik label in 1995, opened The Stone performance space in 2005 and has published and edited five volumes of musicians' writings under the title Arcana.
He tours extensively with his various ensembles, playing a great variety of music and his works are performed worldwide by rock bands, improvisers, jazz musicians and classical ensembles. He has received numerous commissions from among others, the Kronos Quartet, the New York Philharmonic, EOS Orchestra, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Bayerischer Staatsoper, WDR Orchestra Koln and American pianist Stephen Drury.
He has been awarded the William Schuman Award for composition from Columbia University, the Cultural Archievement Award from the Foundation for Jewish Culture and is a MacArthur Fellow.
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).