Bio:
Yvette Cornelia Holzwarth is a violinist, vocalist, composer, and music educator based in Los Angeles. Expanding beyond her Western classical background, her diverse musical interests delve into Eastern European folk, Arabic, Americana, experimental sound-making, popular, jazz and improvised music.
As a violinist, Yvette performs and records with many independent artists — including Kamasi Washington, Van Dyke Parks, Gaby Moreno, Homayoun Shajarian, Carmen Cusack, Brandon Coleman, Rade Šerbedžija, Dent May, among many others. She regularly performs in Eastern Europe as part of a duo with guitarist Miroslav Tadić. Together, they blend Balkan folkloric music with improvisations from a wide range of styles. She has toured internationally (Egypt, Abu Dhabi, Oman) with Arabic orchestra MESTO. She is also a founding member of the performer-composer collective Desert Quill Quartet and of Bridge to Everywhere, a classical chamber group celebrating cultural diversity through interwoven musical traditions.
Residing in Los Angeles, Yvette records on numerous film scores as well as appears on camera in film, TV, and commercial work. Her solo viola work can be heard in "Patriot" Season 2 (Amazon Prime) and "Perpetual Grace" (Epix). Other credits include "Glee" (FOX), "The Good Place" (NBC), "Veep" (HBO), and "Arrested Development" (FOX).
From her home studio, Yvette delivers remote recording services professionally and expediently. She is set up with a sound-treated recording room, equipped with high-quality condenser mics, and works in Ableton Live and Pro Tools. She is experienced in delivering everything from solo lines to orchestral string mixes.
As a songwriter, Yvette releases original music under the moniker Yvette Cornelia. Her debut EP Open It Up (2013) was recently followed up by a full-length album What Lies Ahead (2018). Featuring her nine-piece ensemble, this latest album explores the cracks between chamber music, folk, experimental rock, and songwriting.
As a composer, she has had pieces performed by SF Civic Orchestra, Bay Area’s Awesöme Orchestra, CalArts Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and Desert Quill Quartet. She highly enjoys interdisciplinary work and designs sound for theatre productions (Antigonick and How Little I Know by Scatterstate Theater in San Jose, CA), works with choreographers (Heidi Duckler Dance Theater) and visual artists (Dean Liao, NOH/WAVE), and scores projects for filmmakers and animators. She is also a frequent collaborator with LA-based theater company Four Larks. In 2019, she performed in katabasis, their immersive site-specific exploration of the Greek underworld at the Getty Villa; and in 2020, she premiered in their "thrillingly realized" (LA Times) take on Shelley's Frankenstein at The Wallis Center.
From 2017-2018, Yvette curated an adventurous monthly chamber music series called Hear Sunday in collaboration with the arts nonprofit Clockshop in Frogtown, Los Angeles. In 2013, she lived and worked at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, a permaculture retreat center and small organic farm in West Sonoma County. She holds an M.F.A. in Performance and Composition from the California Institute of the Arts and a Bachelor's in American Literature from UCLA.
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).