Location & Map:
62 Avenue C. NYC, NY 10009 [open map]
Life & Work
Bio:
Nublu is a unique club and record label from the cultural epicenter of New York City, the East Village. There are three entities of the Nublu universe, a live music venue, a record label, and a recently launched Nublu Jazz Festival which has premiered in NYC, São Paulo and Istanbul.
The venue was birthed first in 2002. It started out as a place for like-minded musicians and artists to gather and simply play music together, recalling New York in its creative heyday of the 70’s and 80’s. Nublu has come a long way since its humble beginnings. The club has attracted the admiration of many people and has been touted everywhere from the New York Times to Paper magazine. It is no surprise to come across Lou Reed at the bar, Kevin Spacey or Jorge Ben hanging out, or Norah Jones dancing to Forro. Last year, Jovanotti, the Italian superstar, chose Nublu as the place for his residency. The venue was filled to over capacity for eight straight weeks. Legendary artists like, Gilberto Gil and David Byrne have also done secret shows, and Moby said he realized that he “had more fun DJ’ing records for 75 people at Nublu than going on tour and performing in front of 10,000 people a night” XLR8R Magazine (2008). The list goes on and on.
The second arm of Nublu is the record label, which started in 2005 as a necessary outlet to release the music coming out of the club. The label now boasts a catalogue of over 50 releases, from music ranging from Brazilian acts 3 Na Massa, Otto and Forro in The Dark, to the jazz stylings of I Led 3 Lives and Nublu Orchestra, the indie pop of Hess is More and Wax Poetic. Between all of its entities, Nublu has established itself as a weighty curator and tastemaker in the independent music scene. There is no one sound to Nublu, just a vibe and a great selection. Nublu owner Ilhan Ersahin says it best, “We’re just playing music.”
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).