CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Roberto Fonseca
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City/Place:
Barcelona
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Country:
Spain
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Hometown:
Havana, Cuba
Life
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Bio:
Roberto Fonseca is a Cuban pianist, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and bandleader. Havana-born and based, he has released nine solo albums, collaborated across genres, been nominated for a Grammy Award and toured the world several times over. Along the way he has achieved the aim with which he began his professional career in the early 1990s: “Wherever people are, I want them to hear my music and say, ‘This is Roberto Fonseca’.”
An artist of prowess and ideas, with a questing jazz sensibility and deep roots in the Afro-Cuban tradition, Fonseca continues to astound. ‘The most exciting pianist in Cuba,” avowed Britain’s Guardian newspaper. *Does something new with the old, without ever denying its origins, and opens himself to the world,” insisted France’s Le Figaro. “Makes all possibilities seem possible, and the moment feel perfect, intensely true,” declared the New York Times.
Born in 1975, Fonseca grew up in San Miguel del Padrón in the unassuming Barrio Obrero on the southeastern outskirts of Havana. His father, Roberto Fonseca Senior, played the drums. His mother, Mercedes Cortes Alfaro, was a dancer at the legendary Tropicana Club and is renowned within Cuba as a singer of boleros. His two elder half-brothers are a drummer and a percussionist; the young Roberto was four-years-old when he started playing drums – his first professional gig was in a Beatles cover band – before taking up piano aged eight. He has been composing his own music since adolescence.
His technique is as percussive and muscular as it is agile and delicate. His tastes were always eclectic: hard rock, for its energy and basslines. American jazz, taught at school, consumed in between, with Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett and Oscar Peterson on rotation. Funk and soul. Music made in Africa and Brazil. Reggaeton, electronica, hip-hop. Classical music: “Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Grieg, Bartok,” says Fonseca. “Every day, still.”
And always, ¡siempre!, the music of Cuba – that vibrant, tenacious, creatively fecund Caribbean island. Fonseca’s deep AfroCuban roots underpin a sound that builds bridges between ancient and modern and takes Cuban music – all music – forward, embracing challenges, breaking chains, showing what can be. Inspiring young musicians in Cuba, for whom Fonseca’s cross-genre adventures and international success are a benchmark.
Fonseca was 15-years-old when he made his live solo debut at the Jazz Plaza Festival in Havana. He went on to graduate with a Masters degree in Composition from the prestigious Institute Superior del Arte, determined to focus outward while staying true to his AfroCuban core. Aged 21, he played piano accompaniment to an Italian singer on a tour of Italy. Back in Cuba he joined Temperamento, the progressive jazz outfit led by reedsman Javier Zalba, collaborating with the group for some 15 years and recording the likes of 1998’s En El Comienzo, which won Best Jazz Album at industry awards Cubadisco.
In 1999 Fonseca released his solo debut, Tiene Que Ver. Two albums swiftly followed: 2000’s No Limit: AfroCuban Jazz, a cult classic he recorded in Japan, and Elengó (2001), which mixed AfroCuban rhythms with hip-hop and drum’n’bass. He composed the soundtrack for Black, a film by French director P. Maraval, and produced an album for hip-hop act Obsesión. The international spotlight shone bright in 2001 when Fonseca joined that famed ensemble of elderly maestros, the Buena Vista Social Club, taking over the piano chair from the ailing Ruben Gonzalez (1919 – 2003) then touring the globe with singer Ibrahim Ferrer (1927 – 2005) then with BVSC alumni including evergreen diva Omara Portuondo.
After co-producing and playing on Ferrer’s posthumously released Mi Sueño: A Bolero Songbook (2006), Fonseca unleashed his landmark 2007 jazz-roots solo album Zamazu. Hailed as sensual and modern, as strongly spiritual and crazily trailblazing, Zamazu’s audacious vision involved 20 guest collaborators and augured a glittering future. He followed through with 2009’s Akokan, an album that saw his quartet joined by Cape Verdean vocalist Maya Andrade and American guitarist Raul Midon. 2010’s Live in Marciac was recorded before 5,0000 fans at the eponymous festival town in southwest France.
Tastemakers eyed him, recognising the potential in his playing smarts and bright ideas, his intrinsic Cubanness and ineffable sense of cool. Iconic French designer Agnes B began kitting him out in sharp suits and his trademark leather Byblos hats in 2006 (“We share ideas, concepts”). British-based impresario Gilles Peterson asked him to arrange and co-produce the 2010 Havana Cultura project: a double album showcasing the reggaeton, hip-hop, Afro-jazz and more of Cuba’s new musical generation. Fonseca’s music was sought after for upmarket advertising campaigns. His edgy, leftfield visual sense is exemplified in his videos and album covers, further establishing Fonseca as the consummate creative.
In 2012 came his Grammy-nominated masterwork Yo, a turbocharged album aided by 15 musicians from Cuba, Africa and the US, and a work that went even further in Fonseca’s matching of tradition and experimentation. Nowhere was this change in his compositional approach more obvious than on the brazen, compelling ‘7 Rayos’, which fuses Cuban patterns with classical music, West African instrumentation, electronic music and rhythmic spoken word poetry.
“Writing the track ’7 Rayos’ was life-changing for me,” says Fonseca. “I was almost afraid to something so crazy. But I mixed all these elements, created a bridge and loved the result. It was the start of a new Roberto Fonseca.”
Guesting on Yo is another artist with her eyes on the horizon: the star Malian singer-songwriter and guitarist Fatoumata Diawara, with whom Fonseca embarked on an acclaimed live collaboration that played venues including London’s Barbican and the Philharmonie de Paris. A live album, 2015’s At Home, was also recorded at the Jazz in Marciac festival. “Working with Fatou open my mind about the possibilities of percussion and guitar,” says Fonseca.
2016’s ABUC (“***** Incandescent Cuban contrasts” – The Guardian) told the story of Cuban music past, present and future with a sprawling cast of over 30 guests. Two years in the making, as kaleidoscopic and multi-layered as Cuba itself (“My culture is so strong and varied that the possibilities are endless”), ABUC was released in the same year that Fonseca became Artistic Director of the Inaugural Jazz Plaza Festival in Santiago de Cuba – the sister event of the festival that welcomed his live solo debut 26 years previously.
Alongside the recording and collaborating, the practicing and composing, are Fonseca’s headline live appearances. When at home in Havana, for example, Fonseca and his musicians – who are similarly blessed with musical curiosity and a penchant for experimentation – have a twice-weekly residency at established jazz club Zorro y el Cuevo (Fox and the Crow). There they develop and explore new compositions, testing each other out with lightning fast rhythm changes or leaving room to build ideas, discover the music’s purpose.
In this way Fonseca and his trio – drummer Raúl Herrera and longtime double bass player Yandy Martínez-Rodriguez – shaped many of the 12 original compositions on Fonseca’s new album Yesun. Released on Wagram on 18 October 2019, and featuring guests including Grammy-winning saxophonist Joe Lovano, lauded French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf and rising star Cuban rapper Danae Suarez alongside retro-modern keyboards, electronic beats and samples and those earthy AfroCuban rhythms, Yesun is the album that Fonseca has always wanted to make.
Having proved himself exceptional (indeed, earlier in 2019 he was awarded the distinguished Ordre des Arts Letters from the French Ministry of Culture), Fonseca is free to take more risks, break new ground, take his music – and the music of Cuba – further. The future is his for the taking.
“My culture is strong and varied,” says Fonseca with a smile. “There is so much life here, so much music. We are rich.”
Jane Cornwell
Clips (more may be added)
The Integrated Global Creative Economy
Wolfram Mathematics
This technological matrix, originating in Bahia, Brazil and positioning creators around the world within reach of each other and the entire planet, is able to do so because it is small-world (see Wolfram).
Bahia itself, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other place on earth throughout all of human history, refuge for Lusitanian Sephardim fleeing the Inquisition, Indigenous both apart and subsumed into a brilliant sociocultural matrix comprised of these three peoples and more, is small-world.
Human society, the billions of us in all the complexity of our relationships, is small-world. Neural structures for human memory are small-world. Neural structures in artificial intelligence are small-world...
In a small world great things are possible. In a matrix they can be created.
Alicia Svigals
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
—Nduduzo Makhathini (JOHANNESBURG): piano, Blue Note recording artist
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"Very nice! Thank you for this. Warmest regards and wishing much success for the project! Matt"
—Son of Jimmy Garrison (bass for John Coltrane, Bill Evans...); plays with Herbie Hancock and other greats...
Dear friends & colleagues,
Having arrived in Salvador 13 years earlier, I opened a record shop in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for Bahian musicians, many of them magisterial but unknown.
David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR found us (above), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Bahians and other Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix (people who have passed are not removed), then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
Years ago in NYC I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd (for his rights in Bob Marley compositions; Clement was Bob's first producer), Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein (managed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles) called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Recent access to this matrix and Bahia are from these places (a single marker can denote multiple accesses).
Across the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
For a complete list of everybody inside, tap TOTAL below:
TOTAL
Nduduzo Makhathini
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Matt Garrison
RÁDIO MATRIX