"Randy Lewis has covered pop music for the Los Angeles Times since 1981, working in that time as a reporter, music critic and editor for the Calendar section. He has interviewed most of the members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He’s also written first-person accounts of performing the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev on clarinet and singing Mozart’s Requiem with world-class professionals. In addition, he enjoys belting out “Wooly Bully” in dive bars with his band, the Rounders."
***
In reality Randy's remit goes beyond pop music, extending to, among else, the deep music of New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou country.
The L.A. Times pop music writer rehearses with Pacific Chorale under the guidance of Pacific Symphony conductor Carl St.Clair for upcoming Mozart concerts th...
Matrix team-member Darius Mans, Economist (PhD, MIT), president of Africare (largest aid organization in Africa), presents Africare award to Lula (2012). From 2000 to 2004 Darius served as the World Bank’s Country Director for Mozambique and Angola, leading a team which generated $150 million in annual lending, including support for public private partnerships in infrastructure which catalyzed over $1 billion in private investment. Darius lives between Washington D.C. and Salvador, Bahia.
IV. LET THERE BE PATHWAYS!
"I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
— Susan Rogers, Personal recording engineer for Prince at Paisley Park Recording Studio; Director, Music Perception & Cognition Laboratory, Berklee College of Music
"Many thanks for this - I am touched!" — Julian Lloyd Webber
"I'm truly thankful... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)" — Nduduzo Makhathini, Blue Note Records
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!" — Alicia Svigals, Klezmer violin, Founder of The Klezmatics
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))" — Clarice Assad
"Thank you" — Banch Abegaze, manager, Kamasi Washington
The Matrix uncoils from the Recôncavo of Bahia, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history and from where some of the most physically and spiritually uplifting music ever made evolved...
...all essentially cut off from the world at large. But after 40,000 years of artistic creation by mankind, it's finally now possible to create bridges closely interconnecting all artists everywhere (having begun with the Saturno brothers above).
By the same mathematics positioning some 8 billion human beings within some 6 or so steps of each other, people in the Matrix tend to within close, accessible steps of everybody else inside the Matrix.
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.
Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.
Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — the hand drum in the opening scene above — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).
Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.
