Bio:
Seth Swingle is an award-winning musician and scholar. A curious and dedicated practitioner of traditional music, he has studied Southern banjo styles with noted folklorist Mike Seeger, given talks and performances of banjo history at universities throughout the South, and is 2-time Virginia State Banjo Champion. He can pick, strum, pluck, and beat upon the banjo in a half-dozen archaic and modern banjo styles and in over a dozen tunings. His new CD, Solo 5- & 6-String Banjo, features Seth playing everything from intricate Irish reels to 19th century waltzes to fiery Appalachian breakdowns. He explains, “the banjo was once the universal American instrument, played by men and women of every class. People used the banjo as a courting instrument, a dance instrument, a stage instrument, a parlor instrument. We have this image today of the banjo as a rural, Appalachian, white instrument, but it was played almost exclusively by African-Americans until the 1830’s, was hugely popular in the urban North-East as early as the 1840’s, and was a respectable middle-class instrument by the 1890’s.” Seth brings the wide and varied history of the banjo to life on stage with music that stretches across the centuries to the earliest transcriptions of banjo music and even to the banjo’s roots in W. Africa.
One of Seth’s biggest musical influences was the late Mike Seeger. An indefatigable teacher, musician, field recorder and folklorist, Seeger influenced generations of old-time and traditional musicians. Through a year-long Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Folklife Apprenticeship, Seth was able to study many Southern banjo styles with him. This apprenticeship instilled in Seth a deep appreciation for the art of performing while informing.
In his search to understand the banjo’s history, Seth has also studied the n’goni, a banjo ancestor, with griot Cheick Hamala Diabaté. A Mandé griot (a trained member of the hereditary musician class) from Mali, Cheick is one of the foremost representatives of traditional Malian music in America, and has explored banjo/n’goni connections with Bob Carlin on their Grammy-nominated album, From Mali To America. As his apprentice, Seth has performed with Cheick at the Kennedy Center, Merlefest, and the 1st Black Banjo Gathering.
After graduating from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor’s Degree in Middle Eastern History, Seth received a Fulbright Scholarship to study traditional Mandé music in Mali, W. Africa. In addition to the n’goni, Seth became proficient on the kora, a 21-string African harp capable of complex counterpoint and shimmering cascades of notes. His fluency in French and Bambara have allowed him to immerse himself in Malian society and communicate and play with working musicians throughout Mali. He has performed (in Bambara) at the Festival sur le Niger and on Malian national television.
As an academic and musician, Seth has been an invited lecturer and performer at The Banjo Collectors’ Gathering, the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC Chapel Hill, Appalachian State University, and Virginia Wesleyan College. An unabashed frequenter of banjo contests, he has won numerous ribbons including first place in the Mt. Airy Fiddlers Convention and Appalachian String-Band Festival youth category, two consecutive years as Virginia State Banjo Champion, and has been a finalist in the Clifftop banjo contest.
When not touring, Seth divides his time between Central Virginia and Mali, West Africa.
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).