Matt Dievendorf 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 Matt Dievendorf:
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: Matt Dievendorf
- City: Washington, D.C.
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Matt started his musical career at home under the tutelage of his father, an accomplished guitarist. While still a teenager, performing with multiple groups that included both his father and brother, Matt was immersed in the rock and blues traditions.
After finishing high school Matt was recruited by the U.S. Marine Corps as a guitarist. Four years later, after graduating from the Armed Forces School of Music and performing in hundreds of concerts, Matt headed to the University of Michigan School of Music.
While at Michigan, Matt performed with the University of Michigan Jazz Ensemble and appeared on William Bolcom’s 2005 GRAMMY Award winning album Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Matt graduated from the University of Michigan with highest honors.
Matt has spent several years in Washington, DC as a key player in the DC and Baltimore music communities, and as an accomplished guitar instructor at Levine Music. He freelances with diverse ensembles ranging from alt country and indie-rock outfits to jazz trios and the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra.
In 2013, Matt relocated to Los Angeles, California to study in the famed Studio/Jazz Guitar Program at the University of Southern California. He has earned a Master’s degree and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Thornton School of Music at USC. Matt is the 2018 outstanding doctoral graduate of the Thornton School of Music.
Matt recently returned to the Washington, DC area. He currently performs as a duo with his wife, Amy K Bormet. They explore an eclectic mix of songs from the Great American Songbook, MPB, country, R&B and popular songs as well as original material.
Matt’s latest project Beyond the Horizon is a 50-minute multimedia concert that imagines what it would be like to travel with the New Horizons spacecraft three billion miles to Pluto.
Contact Information
- Email: matt@mattdievendorf.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://mattdievendorf.bandcamp.com/
- ▶ Twitter: mattdievendorf
- ▶ Instagram: mdiev
- ▶ Website: http://www.mattdievendorf.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt1s79n51DqYoF2QHG6IXVw
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCu-LyCBmAzumR4zMVZsOx3Q
- ▶ Vimeo Channel: http://vimeo.com/strangewomanrecords
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 from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through 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.
