Luciano Calazans - The Matrix Online

My Matrix >>>

In the matrix nobody can hear you scream. You don't have to anymore to rise up out of backwaters, backstreets, ghettos and favelas; to be seen and heard far, far away; to be eminently discoverable from Tribeca to Trenchtown to Tokyo to Timbuktu.

Because in the matrix, everybody is somehow accessible from everybody else. All roads lead everywhere. Operating within a matrix removes boundaries, builds bridges and opens up the universe of the arts as its never been open before (full disclosure: our original motive in building the matrix was to provide a cost-free means for wonderful musicians in Bahia to be heard beyond the backwaters and favelas -- ghettos -- of Brazil).

You recommend people by clicking on the categories they create for themselves (on their They Curate Me tabs). You can likewise be recommended for (music & arts related) categories you create for yourself. If you wish only to recommend -- and not be recommended -- simply don't create your own categories. One can follow recommendations without signing up.

Recommendations/curations in series form worldlines, travelling in steps, leaps and bounds. Worldlines taken together form the matrix. That would be "matrix" in its original sense of "source", from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're a real mother for ya!

My Life

Who I Am & Where I Live

Name: Luciano Calazans
City: Salvador, Bahia
Country: Brazil

My Life

Biographical: 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!