Bio:
Lydia Diamond is a prolific playwright and teaching artist whose plays include Smart People, Stick Fly, Harriet Jacobs, Voyeurs de Venus, The Gift Horse, The Inside, and her
adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye. Her early works were nurtured in Chicago theatres like Congo Square, MPAACT and Chicago Dramatists, and have gone on to enjoy productions around the country at theatres including: Arena Stage, Company One, The Goodman, The Guthrie, The Huntington, Kansas City Rep, Long Wharf, The McCarter, Second Stage, Steppenwolf, True Colors, and her Broadway run of Stick Fly at the Cort Theatre on Broadway.
Her work has been commissioned by theatres including: Arena Stage, The Huntington, The Humana Festival, The McCarter Theatre Co., The Roundabout, Second Stage,
Steppenwolf, and True Colors. She has been tapped by HBO to develop an original series, and writes for Showtime’s The Affair.
Ms. Diamond is on demand as a speaker on the radio, at universities, conferences, and institutes around the country. She has held fellowships and residencies at Harvard’s
Radcliffe Institute, The DuBois Institute at Harvard, Arena Stage, TCG/NEA Residency at Steppenwolf, and was a resident playwright for over fifteen years at Chicago Dramatists.
Ms. Diamond is a graduate of Northwestern University, and has taught at DePaul, Columbia College, Gallery 37, and was on faculty for eight years at Boston University.
Text from https://theatreandmusic.uic.edu/directory/lydia-diamond
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).