Mark Stryker 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 Mark Stryker:
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 Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Mark Stryker
- City: Detroit, Michigan
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Bloomington, Indiana
Current News
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What's Up?
On Mark Stryker's JAZZ FROM DETROIT
"Deeply researched and expertly rendered, Mark Stryker's Jazz from Detroit has provided a diligent and insightful window into every aspect of how Detroit came to be one of the major centers of modern American musical research. This is an important and highly entertaining document that will stand as a definitive testament to the musical culture of Detroit."
— Pat Metheny
“There is no other city like Detroit: the musicians, the vibe, the people. Thank you, Mark Stryker, for Jazz from Detroit.”
— Sonny Rollins
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Mark Stryker is an author and award-winning arts reporter and critic based in Detroit. His first book, Jazz from Detroit (University of Michigan Press), was named "Jazz Book of Year" in the 2019 Jazz Times Critics Poll. Stryker covered jazz, classical music and the visual arts for the Detroit Free Press for 21 years from 1995-2016. His many national prizes include two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music writing about bassist Ron Carter and composer Elliott Carter, as well as several reporting awards for coverage of the Detroit Institute of Arts and City of Detroit bankruptcy. Stryker's second book, Destiny: 100 Years of Music, Magic, and Community at Orchestra Hall in Detroit, was published in fall 2019 by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He is a 2020 inductee into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame.
Born in Bloomington, Ind., Stryker earned a bachelor’s degree in American history from the University of Illinois and a master’s degree in journalism from Indiana University. He also worked as a jazz saxophonist before turning to a career in journalism. He worked for the South Bend Tribune and Dayton Daily News, before arriving at the Detroit Free Press. He collects records, vintage hats, drinks the finest Old-World wine he can afford.
Contact Information
- Management/Booking: For media inquiries please contact: Matt Merewitz, Fully Altered Media at matt@fullyaltered.com or 914-566-6368; or Lanell White, University of Michigan Press, lejames@umich.edu or 734-936-0388.
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://www.press.umich.edu/4454129/jazz_from_detroit
- ▶ Book Purchases 2: http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Detroit-Mark-Stryker/dp/0472074261/
- ▶ Twitter: Mark_Stryker
- ▶ Instagram: mstryker63
- ▶ Website: http://jazzfromdetroit.com
- ▶ Blog: http://jazzfromdetroit.com/blog
Clips (more may be added)
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.
