Terri Hinte MATRIX

IMPORTANT ▶▶▶

If You Can't Stand the Heat

Image above is from the base of the cross in front of the church of São Francisco do Paraguaçu in the Bahian Recôncavo

Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes, stoked and steamed and sensual in the widest sense of the word, limned in cadenced song, Brazil is a conundrum wrapped in a smile inside an irony...

This is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin. It was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people). Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David. Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof. Nowhere else but here.

Oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption — elements of these are still strongly entrenched — have defined, delineated, and limited Brazil.

But strictured & bound as it has been and is, Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of — or perhaps because of — the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.

For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...

Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.

"Onde tem miséria, tem música!"* - Raymundo Sodré

And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.

Welcome to the kitchen!

* "Where there is misery, there is music!" Remarked during a conversation arcing from Bahia to Haiti and Cuba to New Orleans and the south side of Chicago and Harlem to the villages of Ireland and the gypsy camps and shtetls of Eastern Europe...

Terri Hinte I RECOMMEND

CURATION

from this node by: Criador acima/Creator above

This is the Universe of

Name: Terri Hinte
City/Place: San Francisco Bay Area
Country: United States

Life & Work

Bio: Soon after arriving in the Bay Area from her native New York in the early 1970s, Terri Hinte began working at Berkeley’s Fantasy Records. By the end of that decade she’d become the label’s publicity director, a post she held for nearly 30 years. She was privileged during that time to promote the music and professional endeavors of many hundreds of artists, ranging from Bill Evans and Hank Crawford to Sylvester and Sonny Rollins. Terri took a special interest in Brazilian music, learning Portuguese and traveling extensively in Brazil. In 2006—the year she left the company—she was honored as the De Facto Curator of Fantasy Records by the Jazz Journalists Association, which presented her with one of its A Team Awards.

As a freelancer, Terri continues to handle public relations for artists and musical enterprises whose work she admires. She is also a travel writer and essayist, a longtime student of metaphysics, and former chair of the Arts and Culture Commission for the city of Richmond, California, where she works and gardens.

Terri is currently working with Sonny Rollins, whom she has represented since 1978; Chicago vocalist Carolyn Fitzhugh, whose second album Living in Peace was produced by Mark Ruffin and arranged by Amina Figarova; Songs: The Music of Allen Toussaint, the new album by the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and their first under the artistic direction of Adonis Rose; vocalist Laurie Antonioli's The Constant Passage of Time, her third recording with her American Dreams band; Encantada Live, the latest by Rio-born, California-based vocalist-composer Claudia Villela; keyboardist-composer Marcos Silva's third album (and first in 30 years), Brasil From Head to Toe; Transitions, the latest work by the Marcus Shelby Orchestra, featuring a four-part suite exploring Negro League baseball; and Sailing Home, the new Origin CD by Texas singer-songwriter Rosana Eckert, produced by Peter Eldridge.

During her many years at Fantasy Records, Terri Hinte was responsible for writing, assigning, and/or editing all bios, press releases, liner notes, newsletters, ads, brochures, and miscellaneous copy generated in connection with the company’s CDs and supporting promotional materials. “Her newsletters and advisories were light-years beyond the puffery that passes for publicity in too many precincts of the music business,” wrote Doug Ramsey in his blog, Rifftides.

Terri was the principal contributor to the Brazilian music section of the original All Music Guide (1993). Travelers’ Tales Brazil (1997) includes two of her essays, one of which—“Argentino”—was a first-prize winner in the 1994 Book Passage Travel Writing Conference writing contest. Since 1994 she has been a member of the Women Writers’ Workshop of Oakland, California. She co-edited (with Elizabeth Fishel) and contributed to the group’s two collections, Wednesday Writers: Ten Years of Writing Women’s Lives (2003) and Something That Matters (2007).

In 2006 Terri wrote the booklet essay for the boxed set The Prime of Antonio Carlos Jobim (Runt/Water Music). She was honored in the annual Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing in 2007 (Silver Certificate for her story “Ask and Receive,” in the Travel and Healing category) and 2010 (Gold Certificate for “Hulk and Me,” Animal Encounter category).