What's Up?
"In 1996, we recorded the album La Rosa de Los Vientos, with Panamanian musicians and producers, and I had to go to New York to hire an Irish violinist who played Latin music. Now I see this guy from Colón, Joshue! We don´t have to go so far anymore to find national quality!"
- Ruben Blades
"The first time I heard Joshue he was playing the violin as if he had been born playing the violin. He is my hero!"
- Danilo Perez
Life & Work
Bio:
Joshue Ashby is considered one of the most creative of his generation in Latin America violinists. As a result of his curiosity, passion and the search for transcendence, he won the Panama Jazz Festiva Presidential Scholarship, for his undergraduate studies in creativity and jazz at Berklee College of Music, from where he graduated in 2012.
Today, Joshue has shared his music in far scattered venues and countries, including: Paraguay, with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra; United States, with C3 Project; Belize, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, with the Youth Orchestra of the Americas; Taiwan, representing the Danilo Perez Foundation in Taipei Jazz Festival, among others.
Intending to pay back his experiences and influence generations to come, Joshue created the C3 Project: a musical social project that not only seeks to create a musical career, but also leave a legacy of philanthropy in Panama and the world. ¨I wish the Panamanian artists have a good rating at national and international level, and simultaneously bring our love to mankind¨, says Joshue.
Honors that Joshue has received include: Panama Heroes 2015, Outstanding Youth JCI (Junior Camera International), Outstanding Panamanian Youth program of MELO S.A. Companie, among other.
Joshue is currently member of National Symphony Orchestra, faculty staff of Danilo Perez Foundation, artistic director of the Creative Musical Youth Camp of Colon, and leader of the project Joshue Ashby & C3 Project.
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).