Bio:
Kotringo started playing piano when she was 5 years old.
After graduating from KOYO SCHOOL OF MUSIC (current・KOYO SCHOOL OF MUSIC & DANCE) she went to study abroad in Boston, then graduated from Berklee College of Music with a Bachelor of Music in Jazz composition and a Bachelor of Music in Performance.
In 2006, "Nichiyomachi (Waiting for Sunday)" which would become her 2nd single, was on air at the J-WAVE radio audition program "RADIO SAKAMOTO" navigated by Ryuichi Sakamoto, then she performed in "LOHAS CLASSIC Concert" also produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
In the same year, she released "Konnichiwa mata ashita (Hello & See you)” produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto as her debut single in Japan.
Since then, she has released 11 solo albums and 7 soundtrack albums.
The latest solo album is “Ame no hakoniwa (My garden in the rain)” released in 2017.
She composed the whole score in a long-running hit animated movie “Konosekai no Katasumi ni (In This Corner of the World)” released in November 2016, which led to her winning the 40th Japan Academy Film Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Music, the 71st Mainichi Film Awards for Best Music, and Best Music Award in the Osaka Cinema Festival 2017.
Music of “In This Corner of the World” Concert, which represented the movie in a music concert, was well-received all over the country.
At present, she has earned a high reputation as a singer-songwriter, composer and pianist with works on soundtracks for movies, dramas, animations, and commercials, and has a deeper expression of orchestra arrangements as well as performances.
In recent years, the range of her voice expressions has expanded, including narration.
In 2018, she visited Argentina on her first overseas tour, making all six performances a huge success and gained worldwide acclaim.
She is now active as an artist who draws a pop world full of floating feelings with outstanding piano performance and soft singing voice.
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).