Bio:
Grammy-nominated cellist William Skeen performs as Principal Cellist with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and American Bach Soloists.
He has served as Principal Cellist with Musica Angelica (Los Angeles), Portland Baroque Orchestra, Pacific MusicWorks, and Bach Collegium San Diego. William has also appeared as continuo cellist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Diego Opera, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. In addition, he has soloed on the viola da gamba with the Dallas Symphony, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Carmel Bach Festival, Oregon Bach Festival, Musica Angelica, Orquestra Nacional de Mexico, and the American Bach Soloists.
He is co-founder of the New Esterházy Quartet, whose repertoire includes over 150 string quartets performed exclusively on gut strings.
With NEQ, William co-founded the San Francisco Early Music Society's Classical Workshop in 2012.
He has served on the faculty on the University of Southern California since 2000.
Skeen also has taught baroque cello and viola da gamba at the American Bach Soloists Academy, San Francisco Early Music Society Baroque Workshop, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and University of California Berkeley. He has performed with Con Gioia on several previous occasions.
William currently tours and records with Musica Pacifica, El Mundo, and Agave Baroque. He is represented on over 80 audio recordings and 30 video recordings, many produced by Voices of Music. Skeen is co-founder of the Cantata Collective, and one-to-a-part ensemble devoted to presenting all of J.S. Bach's cantatas to the Bay Area Community free of charge.
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).