Otis Brown III 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 Otis Brown III:
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 via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Otis Brown III
- City: Plainfield, New Jersey
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
The son of musicians and music educators, New Jersey native Otis Brown grew up to the sounds of jazz, gospel, funk and rhythm and blues. His father, a jazz band instructor, played with James Brown and Al Green. His mother, an educator who also served as principal at Newark’s Arts High School (alma mater to jazz greats Sarah Vaughan and Wayne Shorter), was also a choir director and classically trained pianist. One could surmise that Brown had no choice in the matter when it came to his profession, yet he felt no pressure by his musically-immersed childhood. “I think they understood that it has to, in a way, choose you; you can’t really force it on somebody,” says Brown of a career in music. “My parents were great about that.”
After playing saxophone and drums in school and church, and attending Delaware State University as music major, Brown crossed paths with jazz icon Donald Byrd and his course was dramatically altered. Byrd, who was Artist in Residence at DSU, convinced Brown to think beyond a career in music education and go to New York City to be in the thick of things. “It was life changing,” says Brown, who after studying at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and the Thelonious Monk Institute, caught the attention of Joe Lovano. Initially subbing for Lewis Nash and Idris Muhammad in Lovano’s bands, Brown became a founding member of Lovano’s Us Five quintet, recording three albums, including the GRAMMY-nominated Bird Songs.
Esperanza Spalding holds Us Five’s bass chair, and the musical camaraderie shared with Brown resulted in his joining her band and recording on her debut album. “He always gave and gives one hundred and ten percent of himself musically on the bandstand,” says Spalding, which is a sentiment inspired by most every musician who encounters Brown. “You always get the feeling playing with him, about the humility in his spirit and his willingness to do whatever it takes to take the music to its highest level,” says Ben Williams. That humility is rooted in Brown’s faith which is his personal and professional foundation. “It’s critically important for me; it’s the reason I play,” says Brown. “Without sounding contrived, I think it’s super important for how we try to raise our children, and just for every aspect of life, and music is one of those aspects and avenues for me. Without it, it would be pointless to me. It’s the reason for everything I do.”
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: ob3isme
- ▶ Instagram: ob3isme
- ▶ Website: http://www.obthree.com
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCpIRK2ke9I45sHlkC0HHmXg
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/1tpbVb1DkbDbZbRLAok9eh
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.
