► No matter how big a small world network grows, it remains amazingly small. Put a billion people inside it and they will STILL seldom be more than several steps apart (per the phenomenon behind the widely known "six degrees of separation").

► The matrix virtualizes such a network to make an unlikely group of Brazilian musicians discoverable and accessible by anybody anywhere in world. But in order to work for the Brazilians, the system has to work for everybody.

► Raimundo Sodré once shook the mighty and benighted nation of Brazil before it ground him back into the hardscratch dirt from which he'd risen. His song A Massa — a protest song — blasted out of radios from the Amazon to the industrial south.

► Sodré was threatened with death by the dictatorship and forced into exile, his major label career destroyed. At 72 he still can't come out openly with the full story without fear of retribution.

► Before, I "rescued" royalties for Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Ray Barretto, Airto Moreira, Earl Carroll of The Cadillacs, Rob Royer of Bread, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), and many others.

► Now I work in Bahia, with Brazil's analogues to delta bluesmen. Cana Brava Records in Salvador is our headquarters. The interview is by David Dye for broadcast on U.S. National Public Radio. We have our own "radio", recently lauded in British newspaper The Guardian as one of ten of the best music radio stations in the world. That is here, in an extensive section having to do with what makes such a benighted area with such fraught history such an amazing place.

► If there's one thing I've learned between New York City and Bahia, Brazil, it's that talent and even genius are not inextricably linked with access and worldly success. The world is replete with variations on Sodré, many less sinister but no less disheartening. There's got to be another way to reach out.

► And this is ours: Sodré recommends his colleagues. They recommend others. A nascent small world network including worldlines to