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Tal Wilkenfeld’s new album ‘Love Remains’ is a testament to the celebrated bassist’s unconventional journey, revealing a new side of Tal as a “formidable singer-songwriter” (Rolling Stone) with skills on par with her legend-in-the making musicianship. This new album’s 10 song collection displays the Australian-born, LA-based musician as a talented vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. ‘Love Remains’ “documents [Tal’s] facility as a songwriter and a rich, expressive singer whose voice brings a fluid kind of cohesion” (Billboard), and critics say the album is “outstanding by all accounts” (Paste).
Life & Work
Bio:
With few models of an instrumentalist turned singer-songwriter, Tal has broken extraordinary new ground. As Jackson Browne acknowledged, “I can’t think of another instrumentalist that has ventured into the area that Tal now has, when it comes to writing and singing songs from her own experience.”
“I began singing and writing songs with words when I first picked up a guitar at 14,” said Tal. “When I arrived in the States a couple of years later, I quickly became fixated on guitar and then the bass and I stepped away from lyric writing. After years of being on the road and playing constantly, I really started to miss songwriting. That’s when I began writing songs with lyrics again and creating this album.”
Having performed as a bassist with Jeff Beck as well as making high-profile guest appearances with legends from Mick Jagger and Prince to The Allman Bros and Herbie Hancock, Tal’s experiences performing with the greats has inspired her to hone her craft as an artist in her own right.
‘Love Remains’ suggests, as Tal has said, “the abiding presence of love…or the remnants should it fail.” She’s written a confronting album that alludes to a complex and tragic romance. “The way to diminish darkness is by shining a light on it. That’s what’s so beautiful and rewarding about music.”
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).