Shana Redmond
Matrix Page
Curation & Recommendations...of and for musicians, writers, academics, painters, choreographers, filmmakers, theater directors, sound and set designers, chefs...
CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Shana Redmond
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City/Place:
New York City
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Country:
United States
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Hometown:
Racine, Wisconsin
Life & Work
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Bio:
Shana L. Redmond is a native of Racine, Wisconsin and the daughter of working-class parents, whose experiences of service work and incarceration profoundly impacted her political and racial identity. It is from these experiences and knowledges that she approaches her scholarship and activist work, which are both concerned with laying bare and challenging the material conditions that encode and enforce difference and inequality. Labor, carceral regimes, and racial justice are some of her activist and scholarly interests.
As a scholar, Redmond pulls from multiple subjects, strategies, and approaches in her work and situates her scholarship in and between fields including Black Studies, Performance Studies, History, Critical Ethnic Studies, Sound Studies, English and Literature, Cultural Studies, and (Ethno)Musicology. Her new book is an experimental cartography of the global polymath Paul Robeson and his repetition as vibration, hologram, and the built environment during and after his lifetime. Titled Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, the book forwards a theory of “antiphonal life” in order to announce his continuing influence and labors in the political life of artists, organizers, and intellectuals.
Her first book, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, examines the sonic politics performed amongst and between organized Afro-diasporic publics in the twentieth century. Redmond’s efforts as a musician and labor organizer shaped the form and argumentation of the book, which develops a transnational cultural history of Black racial formations and performance politics. The mixtape that accompanies Anthem, produced and mixed by The Dreadstar Movement, can be found here.
Redmond is currently at work on two book length projects. The first, The Next Jubilee: Black Music and the Possible Impossible, details how Black musical techniques forecast new futures. She is additionally writing a book about “first-world” aid musics titled The Song that Saved the World, which reads songs like “We Are the World” as composing a benevolent regime of failed internationalism. In all of her work, music is both her inspiration and—as Paul Robeson, Fela Kuti, and others have advanced—her weapon; it is the origin of her critique and the method through which alternatives to our present may be heard.
In addition to her scholarship, Redmond has served as a guest expert for the Center Theatre Group of Los Angeles, contributed to numerous interviews for web and radio programming, and written for online publications, including NPR, the Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, and USApp for the London School of Economics.
A mentor and comrade, Redmond is happy to communicate with anyone interested in similar ideas or projects of liberation. She can be reached in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and followed on Twitter @ShanaRedmond.
Clips (more may be added)
"Samba is the son of pain; the great transforming power..."
Caetano Veloso
Son of the Recôncavo, a place in many ways analogous to the cotton-growing country of the American South, birthplace of a music from the absolute bottom-rungs of society, which would conquer a nation.
The transformation is from Brazil: This plexus, the world-girdling canopy of a virtual rainforest tree risen in the Recôncavo above (where samba was born in the hips, hearts and souls of Africans brought to Bahia), initially encompassed musicians in Bahia, and in Brazil... and then musicians everywhere... and then "creators" and those in creative industries... and now any person or entity reaching to adorn and enrich our common universe while ultimately, by the nature of all this approaching (if not already here) Brazil, and Bahia...
Laroyê!
...refracted through a matrix in the original sense of the word ("source", from "mater", Latin for "mother") in which creators may connect to (recommend) other creators and be connected to by other creators; where like stars coalescing into a galaxy, creators mathematically gravitate to proximity to all other creators within, no matter how far apart in location, fame or society.
Wolfram MathWorld on the Small World Phenomenon
Matemática Wolfram sobre o Fenômeno do Mundo Pequeno
Unprecedented as the the Matrix's utilization of small world gravity may be, 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.
How is it that the seeming magic of small world networks does the trick? An explanation in Hamlet's nutshell:
10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10
Imagine 10 doorways, each capable of taking you to a person somewhere around the world, these doorways and the 10 people behind them recommended by somebody you admire and trust.
You choose a doorway and enter.
There you find that the recommended person also recommends 10 doorways, each with a recommended person behind it.
After you have walked through a series of 9 such doorways, you will have had access to 10⁹, one billion choices (these choices can be repeats).
By this means the Matrix allows for the construction of pathways between the most far-separated people. The fact that these pathways exist does not mean that they will BE followed. It means that they CAN be followed.
It means that whereas before connections did not exist and in many cases discovery was impossible, now there are (potential) ways to everybody and everything.
All is closer than we imagine.
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze: manager, Kamasi Washington
🔗connections from Kamasi include ↓
Susan Rogers
"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
🔗connections from Susan include ↓
Randy Brecker
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
🔗connections from Randy include ↓
Herbie Hancock
🔗connections from Herbie include ↓
Alfredo Rodrigues
🔗connections from Alfredo include ↓
Munir Hossn
🔗connections from Munir include ↓
Roberto Mendes
🔗connections from Roberto include ↓
Maria Bethânia
🔗connections from Maria include ↓
J. Velloso
🔗connections from J. include ↓
João do Boi ↓
🔗You've been taken from LA, Grammys and success, to profoundly unknown cultural genius in a place you never would have gotten to otherwise, via a series of pathways and crossroads uncoiling from the sprawling cultural matrix of Terra Brasilis: Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian...
...conceived in a Spiritus Mundi 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 slums of Kingston to the townships of South Africa to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe...
...through Raymundo Sodré of the backlands of Bahia (career destroyed, threatened with death under Brazil's dictatorship, forcing him into exile), who, while in conversation in consideration of the sequence above, opined for the ages: "Where there's misery there's music!" Thus the Matrix.
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd-Webber: UK's premier cellist; brother of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad: Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals: World's premier klezmer violinist
Matrix Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, bewitching and bewitched, contouring the resplendent Bay of All Saints (end of clip below, before credits), absolute center of terrestrial gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's ineffable Black Rome: Salvador da Bahia (seat of the Integrated Global Creative Economy* and where Bule Bule is seated below, around the corner from where we built this matrix as an extension of our record shop).
Assis Valente's (of Santo Amaro, Bahia) "Brasil Pandeiro" filmed by Betão Aguiar
Betão Aguiar
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Replete with Brazilian greatness, but we listened to Miles Davis and Jimmy Cliff in there too; visitors are David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR/WXPN
*Darius Mans holds a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, and lives between Washington D.C. and Salvador da Bahia.
Between 2000 and 2004 he served as the World Bank’s Country Director for Mozambique and Angola. In that capacity, Darius led a team which generated $150 million in annual lending to Mozambique, including support for public private partnerships in infrastructure which catalyzed over $1 billion in private investment.
Darius was an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where he worked closely with the U.S. Treasury and the IMF to establish a framework to avoid debt repudiation and to restructure private commercial debt in Brazil and Chile.
He taught Economics at the University of Maryland and was a consultant to KPMG on infrastructure projects in Latin America.
Recommend somebody and you will appear on that person's page. Somebody recommends you and they will appear on your page.
Both pulled by the inexorable mathematical gravity of the small world phenomenon to within range of everybody inside.
And by logical extension, to within range of all humanity outside as well.
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 founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.