CURATION
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from this page:
by Augmented Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Luciano Calazans
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City/Place:
Salvador, Bahia
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Country:
Brazil
Life & Work
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Bio:
Luciano Calazans é um baixista, compositor e arranjador de Salvador da Bahia, Brasil, e ser um baixista aqui significa ter que habitar alguns dos ritmos mais sofisticados do mundo enquanto percorre melodias e harmonias que vão desde o folclórico até o futurista.
Luciano começou a tocar nos bares e bailes de Salvador profissionalmente aos treze anos de idade e, desde então, tocou, produziu e arranjou para alguns dos maiores astros do Brasil. Ele foi impulsionado pela música, crescendo ouvindo seu pai tocar violão em rodas de choro...começando com a flauta doce e passando para o violão aos dez anos de idade. Foi durante o Carnaval de 1985 que Luciano ficou parado e observou enquanto o grupo seminal de Salvador, Acordes Verdes, passava - liderado pelo baixista Carlinhos Marques - e Luciano decidiu mudar para o baixo. Junto com amigos, ele montou sua primeira banda enquanto sua família morava em Curuzu, no bairro da Liberdade, em Salvador.
Em 1989, Luciano recebeu uma bolsa de estudos e ingressou em um curso preparatório para composição e regência. Ele havia sido notado por uma professora de percepção musical - Maria das Graças - que descobriu algo sobre Luciana que ele não sabia... o menino tinha ouvido absoluto. Então, em 1992, aos dezessete anos, Luciano foi convidado para se juntar - como baixista e diretor musical - a uma banda de Salvador de renome nacional: Banda Reflexu's. Luciano agora estava tocando em grandes palcos e na televisão.
Uma sessão de gravação nos icônicos Estúdios WR de Salvador chamou a atenção do proprietário Wesley Rangel e Luciano foi chamado para tantas sessões de estúdio que deixou a Banda Reflexu's. Ele gravou para Margareth Menezes (que foi apresentada aos Estados Unidos por David Byrne), Gilberto Gil, Timbalada, Fafá de Belém, Zezé de Camargo e Luciano, Luís Melodia, Léo Gandelman, Aldo Brizzi e muitos outros. Em 1993, Margareth Menzes pediu a Luciano para se juntar à sua banda. No mesmo ano, Luciano ganhou o Troféu Caymmi de Melhor Instrumentista de Salvador.
O CD de Luciano, Contrabaixo Astral, foi gravado nos Estúdios WR sem custos para Luciano, um presente de Wesley Rangel por Luciano ter ganho o 1º Prêmio de Melhor Arranjo na 2ª Edição do Festival de Música da Rádio Educadora. O arranjo pelo qual Luciano ganhou foi para uma de suas próprias composições - Valsinha - que é claro, está no CD.
Em 2008, Luciano produziu Versão Brasileira de Belô Velloso, um CD que passou várias semanas no Top 10 do Brasil.
Em 2009, Luciano fez todos os arranjos para uma obra de orquestra de câmara intitulada "Um Estado de Espírito", que incluía uma bela peça cantada por Gal Costa, "As Coisas Que Caymmi Cantou". Luciano nunca para. Seu projeto atual e contínuo é Ufonia, uma pequena "big band" incluindo uma seção de metais com os melhores músicos da Bahia. Ufonia teve orgulho de apresentar o percussionista convidado especial Robertinho Silva no palco em 2010. E Flavio Venturini recentemente cantou em uma faixa produzida por Calazans incluída em um CD produzido pela Natura para o benefício ecológico das tartarugas marinhas do Brasil.
A música brasileira é uma fusão sublime de algumas das harmonias mais ricas do mundo com alguns dos ritmos mais sofisticados (como já apontamos). Tem uma história magnífica e, com porta-vozes como Luciano Calazans na cena, também tem um futuro magnífico!
English:
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!
Contact Information
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Record Company:
Dubas Música
Rio de Janeiro
Matrix Music Player
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Uma Tarde no Sertão - Luciano Calazans
3 tracks
9,635 plays |
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Clips (more may be added)
We use the mathematics of the small world phenomenon to transform the creative universe into a creative village wherein all are connected by short pathways to all... (Wolfram explains how above)
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Great culture is great power.
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
Our Matrix was conceived under a Spiritus Mundi ranging from the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to Havana and the provinces of Cuba to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago to the sidewalks of Harlem to the townships of South Africa to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe...*
Sodré
*...in conversation with Raymundo Sodré, who summed up the irony in this sequence by opining for the ages: "Where there's misery, there's music!" Hence A Massa, anthem for the trod-upon folk of Brazil, which blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south until...
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Assis Valente's (of Santo Amaro, Bahia) "Brasil Pandeiro" filmed by Betão Aguiar
Betão Aguiar
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Replete with Brazilian greatness, but we listened to Miles Davis and Jimmy Cliff in there too; visitors are David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR/WXPN
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magnificent Brazilian musicians.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar found us (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix, then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
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...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 founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Salvador is our base. If you plan to visit Bahia, there are some things you should probably know and you should first visit:
www.salvadorbahiabrazil.comAcross the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
Wolfram MathWorld
Ex Terra Brasilis
Alicia Svigals
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Roberto Mendes
Luciano Calazans
Gustavo Caribé
J Velloso
Lázaro Ramos
Fernando Guerreiro
Maria Marighella
Russell Okung
Bule Bule
Caetano Veloso
RÁDIO MATRIX