Curation & Recommendations ...of and for musicians, writers, academics, painters, choreographers, filmmakers, theater directors, sound and set designers, chefs...
CURATION
from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
Name:
Zé Miguel Wisnik
City/Place:
São Paulo
Country:
Brazil
Life & Work
Bio:
José Miguel Soares Wisnik, mais conhecido como Zé Miguel Wisnik, nasceu em São Vicente, São Paulo, em 27 de outubro de 1948. Ele é um músico, compositor e ensaísta brasileiro. Wisnik também é professor de Literatura Brasileira na Universidade de São Paulo. Ele se formou em Letras (Português) pela Universidade de São Paulo em 1970, e também é mestre (1974) e doutor em Teoria Literária e Literatura Comparada (1980) pela mesma universidade. Wisnik estudou piano clássico durante muitos anos antes de optar pela faculdade de Letras.
Wisnik tem quatro discos gravados: o homônimo José Miguel Wisnik (1992), São Paulo Rio (2002), que contou com a participação da cantora Elza Soares, Pérolas aos Poucos (2003), o CD duplo Indivisível (2011) e Vão (2022). Ele também fez música para cinema, teatro e dança, e fez quatro trilhas sonoras para o Grupo Corpo. Desde 2005, ele tem realizado várias séries de "aulas-shows" com o violonista e compositor Arthur Nestrovski.
English:
José Miguel Soares Wisnik, better known as Zé Miguel Wisnik, was born in São Vicente, São Paulo, on October 27, 1948. He is a Brazilian musician, composer, and essayist. Wisnik is also a professor of Brazilian Literature at the University of São Paulo. He graduated in Letters (Portuguese) from the University of São Paulo in 1970, and is also a master (1974) and doctor in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature (1980) by the same university. Wisnik studied classical piano for many years before opting for the Faculty of Letters.
Wisnik has recorded four albums: the eponymous José Miguel Wisnik (1992), São Paulo Rio (2002), which featured singer Elza Soares, Pérolas aos Poucos (2003), the double CD Indivisível (2011) and Vão (2022). He also makes music for film, theater, and dance, and made four soundtracks for Grupo Corpo. Since 2005, he has performed several series of "lesson-concerts" with guitarist and composer Arthur Nestrovski.
Recommend Zé Miguel Wisnik in order to appear here. Click on the grey crosses visible when logged in. Your photo will appear, with a link back to your page:
Universalization from Brazil:ˈmātriks / original meaning: WOMB or SOURCE / derived from "mater", Latin for "mother" (we're real mothers for ya!)
Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes, stoked, steamed and sensual in the broadest sense of the word, limned in prosody and cadenced melody, bewitching (and bewitched) Bahia is where the magic (mathematical and otherwise) and enchantment upon which this matrix is based, begins...
A matrix wherein it's not which pill you take, it's what pathways you take, pathways originating in the sprawling cultural matrix of Terra Brasilis: Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian... Matrix Ground Zero being the Recôncavo, contouring the Bay of All Saints, Earth's absolute center of gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's inffable Black Rome: Salvador da Bahia.
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano Veloso, son of the Recôncavo, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
The Matrix is a small world network in which creators may recommend other creators and be recommended by other creators. And where, like stars coalescing into a galaxy, creators in the Matrix mathematically gravitate to proximity to all other creators in the Matrix, no matter how far apart in location, fame or society. This gravity is called "the small world phenomenon".
While the Matrix's utilization of small world gravity is unprecedented (position everybody in the creative universe within discoverable range of everybody else in the creative universe), small world networks are all around us, even inside us: our brains contain small world networks. Humanity itself is a small world network, wherein over 8 billion human beings average 6 or fewer steps between any two given people, anywhere. Those steps are seldom all transitable though. In the Matrix they are. In a small world great things are possible.
Conceived in conversation with Raymundo Sodré (now 75 years old ~ born among the trod-upon folk of the Brazilian hinterlands ~ rocket-like career smashed under Brazil's dictatorship) — during a discourse ranging from the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago ::: to the sidewalks of Harlem to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium ::: to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe — wherein Sodré opined for the ages something now inscribed on the wall of Plato's cave: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
I built the Matrix in the place below (I'm below left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) 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. The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira, with Mateus Aleluia... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter; designed by Walter Mariano of the Federal University of the Recôncavo of Bahia).
"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).