Bio:
Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk is a singer, accordion player and researcher of Eastern European musical folklore. Born in Warsaw, for the past several years she has been dividing her time between Warsaw and Jerusalem. Olga is educated in classical music (B.A. in Music School of F.Chopin in Warsaw) and graduated with a master’s degree in Anthropology of Culture (Warsaw University). Since the very beginning of her creative work she has focused on Jewish music of Ashkenazi roots, especially from the borderlands of Poland (Galitzia, Polesye). She's studied Chassidic music, Yiddish folk songs, and multilingual Jewish songs. She participated in a two-year seminar for Yiddish songs in the Yiddish Theatre in Warsaw and is studying Yiddish in the Yung Yidish center in Tel Aviv. Olga also studied the traditional singing techniques of Slavic music (per Ukrainian “white voice") with the Borderland Music Foundation, based in Poland.
Olga has performed at Lincoln Center in New York City, the Jewish Museum in Oslo, the Eden-Tamir Music Center in Jerusalem, the Jewish Music Festival in Warsaw, the Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver, the Jewish Music Festival in Berkeley California, Festival Piyut in Jerusalem, in the Jewish community Center in Copenhagen, in the Polish Consulate in Kaliningrad...and many other wonderful festivals and places.
Her debut CD "Jewish Folksongs from the Shtetl" was very well received, and her album "Lilalo" was released in 2015.
Olga is initiating Polish-Israeli music projects in cooperation with organizations for Yiddish culture in Israel and Poland: Shalom Foundation in Warsaw, Cukerman’s Gate Foundation and Meeting Rimanov Association, and the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews.
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).