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Who I Am & Where I Live:
- Name: Leyla McCalla
- City: New Orleans
- Country: United States
My Life
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Biographical:
The Capitalist Blues is Leyla McCalla’s way of processing the current political environment, where many of the issues are financial, but they’re rarely simply financial. “It feels like everyone’s in a pressure cooker in this country,” she says.
The album is McCalla’s third, after Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes (2013) and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey (2016). Those albums and her time as a member of the African-American string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops presented her vision in songs that revealed the realities that people lived, often expressed in metaphors. She explored Haitian Creole identity issues in songs with arrangements that focused on the song. She often sang and accompanied herself on cello, banjo, or guitar.
The New York-born McCalla has lived in New Orleans since 2010, and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey broadened not only her examination of Creole identities but her sound as she brought in a number of musicians to add fiddle, clarinet, piano, electric guitar, and additional voices.
Her growing relationship to the city’s musical community led her to consider her relationship to New Orleans on The Capitalist Blues, and for the first time, it led her to record with a band. It wasn’t by design. Producer Jimmy Horn asked her sing on a session with his acclaimed New Orleans R&B band, King James and the Special Men, at a time when she had new songs but was unsure what forms they should take. While singing with the Special Men, she realized that working with Horn and his band in New Orleans might be the right way into the new material. The collaboration marks the first time someone other than McCalla has produced her work. The Capitalist Blues shows a more physical, danceable side to McCalla’s music. The title track is a swinging blues, and it’s easy to hear the classic New Orleans R&B in “Me and My Baby,”and the calypso in “Money is King.”
The album also puts McCalla’s voice in a number of new contexts as the size and composition of the band behind her varies from track to track. “There’s more arrangement,” she says, so her voice stands out in the way fans of her previous albums might expect on the spare “Pennha,” but she’s clearly part of a rowdy group on “Me and My Baby.”The pressures people deal are subtext on some songs, but they’re tangible and personal in others. “Heavy as Lead” addresses the threat caused by lead in the soil—a problem that became very real for McCalla when her daughter tested positive for elevated lead levels. The Capitalist Blues is superficially different from McCalla’s previous albums, but she hears the connections between them all.
She still sings a number of songs in Haitian Creole, which she thinks of a “language of resistance,” and she further explores the connection between New Orleans and Haiti. Her interest in social justice issues remains, and many of the themes are extensions of ones she examined on A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey. The lineups are very different, but the songs come from the same place.
“To me, it’s all folk music,” McCalla says. The album is striking as McCalla employs a broader musical palate than on her previous albums, one that often involves a full band and percussion. One instrument noticeable in its absence is the cello, which has been McCalla’s signature instrument throughout her solo career and her time with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. “I’ve come to a place where I feel like making art is not tied to being a cellist,” she says.
My Media
- Website: http://leylamccalla.com
- Instagram: leylacello
- YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLU2ydZ3FX_UXICRPMDatDA
Listen on Spotify
Contact Information
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Management/Booking:
Management:
Aaron Johnson at Knitting Factory Management
aaronj@knittingfactorymgmt.com
(510) 610-6997
Booking (North America):
Mel Puljic – The Awesome Company
mel@awesomecompany.net
Booking (Europe):
Jean-Herve Michel at Nueva Onda
info@nuevaonda.fr
THE MATRIX IS MUSICIAN / ARTIST RECOMMENDATIONS BY THE MOST POWERFUL, SOPHISTICATED & SUBTLE SOFTWARE YET DEVISED:
⇒ the minds of other artists
IT'S BASED IN BAHIA, GROUND ZERO FOR BRAZIL'S SUN-CARONA VIBRANT AFRO-BRAZILIAN CULTURE
⇒ ...rooted in a region called the Recôncavo, analogous in Brazil to the Mississippi Delta in the United States.
THE MATRIX REACHES FROM BRAZIL TO CUBA TO BROOKLYN TO BERLIN TO TOKYO TO TIMBUKTU
⇒ To wherever people want to take it...
IT IS THE NEXT-STEP EVOLUTION OF A SPECIALTY RECORD SHOP
⇒ ...opened in Salvador to showcase magisterial musicians almost completely unknown to the world...many of them living in poverty or close to it and unable to avail themselves of traditional (and costly) means of publicizing.
PRE-BRAZIL — IN NEW YORK CITY — WE "RESCUED" UNPAID ROYALTIES FOR PERFORMERS & COMPOSERS INCLUDING:
⇒ Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Led Zeppelin, Philip Glass, Mongo Santamaria, Airto Moreira, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Jim Hall, Taj Mahal, Robb Royer of Bread, Speedo & the Cadillacs, and many more! With Speedo's (Earl Carroll) amazing story (kid singing on the streetcorners of Harlem to doo-wop fame to working as a beloved school janitor) I learned (as Quincy Jones had figured out decades before) that greatness and fame are completely independent. The wave repeated here in Brazil with Raimundo Sodré, who went from zero to national fame and back to zero.
HENCE A (and so far the world's only) SMALL WORLD CURATION NETWORK...
⇒ A wave of Exu's cyberwand opening pathways allowing ANY ARTIST — FAMOUS OR NOT — in ANY FIELD — in ANY PLACE in the world — to potentially be reached by ANYBODY from ANYWHERE. (Exu -- eh-SHOO -- is the Afro-Brazilian deity responsible for opening pathways.)
BY WHAT WIZARDRY?
⇒ We've all heard of six degrees of separation, more properly called a small world network. Within six or so steps we can move through a chain of people knowing other people to just about anybody on the planet.
SIMPLY CHANGE "KNOW" TO "RECOMMEND"
⇒ In exactly the same way, step by step we can move through chains of ARTISTS CURATING ARTISTS to to just about any artist on the planet.
LIKE THIS...
⇒ From Quincy Jones we access one of his protégés, stellar young Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez. From Alfredo Rodriguez we access a fabulous multinstrumentalist Alfredo plays with, Munir Hossn. Two more steps and we've reached the above-mentioned Raimundo Sodré, formerly virtually unreachable in Bahia...
Raimundo Sodré Now
Dengo
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Add to my PlaylistSina de Cantador - Raimundo Sodré (6,525 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistMagnetismo - Raimundo Sodré (6,229 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistSacando a Cana - Raimundo Sodré (5,877 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistMêrêrê - Raimundo Sodré (5,402 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistA Massa - Raimundo Sodré (4,958 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistJardim do Amor - Raimundo Sodré (4,631 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistDebaixo do Céu - Raimundo Sodré (4,112 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistDesejo de Amar - Raimundo Sodré (3,823 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistOração pra Yá Oxum - Raimundo Sodré (3,701 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistYá África - Raimundo Sodré (3,472 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistMeu Rio, Cadê o Papel - Raimundo Sodré (3,148 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistCasa de Trois - Raimundo Sodré (2,868 plays)
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Add to my PlaylistMulher é Laço que Prende o Coração do Va... (2,531 plays)
DICTATED SILENCE
⇒ Sodré's meteoric major-label career was crushed by the Brazilian dictatorship years ago and he was forced to flee Brazil under threat of death...into a 19 year exile. He became almost impossible to find and hear, even after returning to Brazil.
MUSIC FALLS LIKE RAIN
⇒ But now lines of everbranching interlinked recommendations rise from Bahia to form a (small world) network rounding the planet like the arboreal canopy of a vast Amazonian rainforest. When the dictatorship ground Sodré into the dust, they unwittingly planted a seed.
FROM SODRÉ, A WORLDLINE TO SPLENDID BULE BULE (LEATHER HAT) ABOVE... AND TO OTHERS IN THE CLIP...
⇒ "The time has arrived for these people of color to show their worth ... I want to see Uncle Sam play tambourine so the whole world can samba!"
AND FROM BULE ON...
⇒ ...tendrils twining through urban centers and beautiful backwaters... through New York boroughs, Burkina Faso... County Clare... Cape Town...
THROUGH ARTISTS ACROSS THE BOARD
⇒ ...writers, journalists, photographers, painters, illustrators, architects, choreographers, filmmakers...
IS THE MATRIX AN ALTERNATE REALITY?
⇒ Only if your reality has been defined by corporate mass media. The original meaning of "matrix" is "source", from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
DOES THE MATRIX WATCH YOU?
⇒ Zero surreptitious tracking, data mining and data brokerage per Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, et al.
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