Bio:
Steve McQueen, Steven Rodney McQueen, was born on October 9, 1969, in Ealing, near London, England. He is best known to the general public for his feature-length commercial films such as “Hunger” (2008), “Shame” (2011), and “12 Years a Slave” (2013).
McQueen was born to a Grenadian father and a Trinidadian mother, both of whom had immigrated to England. He studied art in London at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and at Goldsmiths College, where he developed an enthusiasm for film. That interest took him to Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, in New York City, but he left after three months. He nonetheless continued to make art, including photographs, sculptures, short films, and installations.
His early films included the ambiguous short black-and-white silent film “Bear” (1993), in which two naked men square off; “Exodus” (1997), a one-minute-long Super 8 film following the movements of two men carrying potted palm trees through crowded London streets; “Deadpan” (1997), the filmmaker’s take on a scene from Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (1928); and “Drumroll” (1998), in which the viewer sees the effects of the artist rolling an oil drum containing three cameras filming the New York City streets.
For his artwork, McQueen has received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist. In 2006, he produced “Queen and Country”, which commemorates the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps. He became known for directing films that deal with intense subject matters such as “Hunger” (2008), a historical drama about the 1981 Irish hunger strike; “Shame” (2011), a drama about an executive struggling with sex addiction; “12 Years a Slave” (2013), an adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 slave narrative memoir; and “Widows” (2018), a crime thriller set in contemporary Chicago. He released “Small Axe” (2020), a collection of five films “set within London’s West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early '80s” and the BBC documentary series “Uprising” (2021).
For “12 Years a Slave”, he won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama. McQueen is the first Black filmmaker to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
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"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; recorded "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
Conceived under a Spiritus Mundi ranging from the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to Havana and the provinces of Cuba to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago to the sidewalks of Harlem to the townships of South Africa to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe...*
*...in conversation with Raymundo Sodré, who summed up the irony in this sequence by opining for the ages: "Where there's misery, there's music!" Thus A Massa, anthem for the trod-upon folk of Brazil, which blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south until Sodré was silenced, threatened with death and forced into exile...
And thus a platform whereupon all creators tend to accessible proximity to all other creators, irrespective of degree of fame, location, or the censor.
Matrix Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, bewitching and bewitched, contouring the resplendent Bay of All Saints (end of clip below, before credits), absolute center of terrestrial gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's ineffable Black Rome (seat of the Integrated Global Creative Economy* and where Bule Bule is seated below, around the corner from where we built this matrix as an extension of our record shop).
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
*Darius Mans holds a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, and lives between Washington D.C. and Salvador da Bahia.
Between 2000 and 2004 he served as the World Bank’s Country Director for Mozambique and Angola. In that capacity, Darius led a team which generated $150 million in annual lending to Mozambique, including support for public private partnerships in infrastructure which catalyzed over $1 billion in private investment.
Darius was an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where he worked closely with the U.S. Treasury and the IMF to establish a framework to avoid debt repudiation and to restructure private commercial debt in Brazil and Chile.
He taught Economics at the University of Maryland and was a consultant to KPMG on infrastructure projects in Latin America.
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).
EX TERRA BRASILIS
The Small World Phenomenon
Susan Rogers
Alicia Svigals
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Sodré
Betão Aguiar
Bule Bule
Caetano Veloso
Darius Mans
Sparrow/Pardal Roberts
RÁDIO MATRIX