Luciano Calazans 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 Luciano Calazans:
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 Artist
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Luciano Calazans
- City: Salvador, Bahia
- Country: Brazil
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Luciano Calazans is a bass player, composer, and arranger from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and being a bass player here means having to inhabit some of the most sophisticated rhythms in the world while arcing through melodies and harmonies ranging from folkloric to futuristic.
Luciano began playing the bars and bailes of Salvador professionally at thirteen years of age, and has since played for, produced, and arranged for some of Brazil's greatest stars. He was propelled into music, growing up listening to his father play guitar in rodas de choro (choro circles; choro is an erudite music something like chamber samba)...beginning on the recorder and moving to the guitar at ten years of age. It was during Carnival 0f 1985 that Luciano stood and watched as seminal Salvador group Acordes Verdes (Green Chords) passed by -- led by bass player Carlinhos Marques -- and Luciano decided to switch to bass. Together with friends he put together his first band while his family lived in Curuzu, in Salvador's neighborhood of Liberdade (Liberty, one of the largest black neighborhoods in South America).
In 1989 Luciano received a scholarship for and entered into a preparatory course for composition and directing. He'd been noticed by a professor of musical perception -- Maria das Graças -- who discovered something about Luciana he wasn't aware of...the boy had absolute pitch. Then in 1992, at seventeen years of age, Luciano was asked to join -- as bass player and music director -- a Salvador band of nation-wide renown: Banda Reflexu's. Luciano was now playing on big stages and television.
A recording session at Salvador's iconic WR Studios caught the attention of owner Wesley Rangel and Luciano was called in for so many studio sessions that he left Banda Reflexu's. He recorded for Margareth Menezes (who was introduced to the United States by David Byrne), Gilberto Gil, Timbalada, Fafá de Belém, Zezé de Camargo e Luciano, Luís Melodia, Léo Gandelman, Aldo Brizzi and many others. In 1993 Margareth Menzes asked Luciano to join her band. In the same year Luciano won Salvador's Troféu Caymmi (Caymmi Trophy) as Best Instrumentalist.
Luciano's CD Contrabaixo Astral (the title being a play on words that only Portuguese-speakers will understand) was recorded at WR Studios at no charge to Luciano, a gift from Wesley Rangel for Luciano's having won 1st Prize for Best Arrangement in the 2nd Edition of Rádio Educadora's Festival of Music (Rádio Educadora is Brazil's National Public Radio). The arrangement for which Luciano won was for one his own compositions -- Valsinha (Little Waltz) -- which appears of course on the CD.
In 2008 Luciano produced Belô Velloso's Versão Brasileira (Brazilian Version), a CD which spent several weeks in Brazil's Top 10.
In 2009 Luciano did all the arrangments for a chamber orchestra work entitled "Um Estado de Espírito" (A State of Spirit), which included a beautiful piece sung by Gal Costa, "As Coisas Que Caymmi Cantou" ("The Things which Caymmi Sung": Dorival Caymmi was the musical bard of Bahia, one of Brazil's icons).
Luciano never stops. His current and ongoing project is Ufonia, a small "big band" including a horn-section featuring Bahia's top players. Ufonia was proud to feature special guest percussionist Robertinho Silva onstage in 2010. And Flavio Venturini recently sang on a Calazans-produced track included in a CD produced by Natura for the ecological benefit of Brazil's sea turtles.
Brazilian music is a sublime melding of some of the world's richest harmonies with some of its (as we've already pointed out) most sophisticated rhythms. It has a magnificent history, and with torch-bearers like Luciano Calazans on the scene, it also has a magnificent future!
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: CalazansLuciano
- ▶ Instagram: luciano_calazans
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Musicomaluco31
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCgfSaemrDEqUZHZ--_wRV-A
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/24TGz8d7BV6j0rOGy8bYIf
Matrix Music Player
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Uma Tarde no Sertão - Luciano Calazans3 tracks9,629 plays | 2,506 views
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.
