Bio:
When Scott Kettner looks at a map, he sees a direct line that connects the rivers of northeastern Brazil to the parishes of New Orleans and the streets of Brooklyn. A master percussionist, bandleader, producer and songwriter, Kettner is the guiding force behind Nation Beat, a band whose teeming, vibrant rhythms find common ground in the primal maracatu rhythm of Brazil’s northeastern region, the Big Easy’s funky, hypnotic second-line and strolling Mardi Gras Indians, and the unfettered freedom of big-city downtown jazz.
For Kettner, the discovery of maracatu was a life-changing experience. The great jazz drummer Billy Hart, who served as Kettner’s instructor at New York’s New School University, first informed him of the mysterious music. “He was turning me on to African music from different regions,” says Kettner, “and we started getting into Afro-Cuban rhythms and Brazilian rhythms. After a couple of years studying samba and bossa nova, I asked him, ‘Are there any other rhythms from Brazil that I should be learning?’ He said, ‘Yeah, man, there’s this music called maracatu!’ I pointed to his drumset and said, ‘Show it to me,’ and he said, ‘I don’t know how to play it! I just know it’s a badass rhythm and you have to go learn it, then come back and teach it to me.’”
Intrigued, Kettner began asking Brazilian musicians based in New York how he could learn about maracatu. Even most of them knew nothing of it. The only thing to do, Kettner reasoned, was to go to Brazil and find maracatu. Upon graduating in 2000, he spent a year living in the country, based primarily in the northeastern city of Recife, living in a favela, studying maracatu and other, even more obscure Brazilian rhythms with his new mentor, Jorge Martins. Upon his return to the USA, Kettner implemented maracatu in NYC and began performing and conducting workshops throughout the country.
As a side-man, Scott Kettner has performed and/or recorded with Willie Nelson, Cyro Baptista, Stanton Moore and Galactic, Frank London, The Klezmatics, Cascabulho, Vieux Farka Toure, Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante and many more.
His new book entitled “Maracatu for Drumset and Percussion” is now available by Hal Leonard Publishing. This is the first in-depth percussion book about the rich culture and music of Maracatu de Baque Virado from Brazil, with photos, history, recordings and an instructional CD-Rom.
Scott is also a recent recipient of a prestigious NEA (National Endowment for The Arts) award for his project entitled “A Tale of Two Nations” which brought together his group Nation Beat and the traditional maracatu group from Recife, Brazil Estrela Brilhante. The grant helped fund a tour that had it’s world debut at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in the summer of 2013. This tour was historic in that it was the first time that a traditional maracatu group from Brazil had ever performed in the United States.
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).