Alex Alvear has done several firsts with Microfundo. Alex was the first artist started working with. He was the first to raise funding to do a recording session with his band Mango Blue at the beautiful new studio at WGBH in Boston.
His album is in post production this month (see video below) and Alex will be the first to release a new studio recording produced entirely by fans via Microfundo!
And Alex is now the first to be able to take part in our great new offer that Microfundo can now make to fans as part of our new artist and fan recordings collective.
As of now, actually as of these past several weeks, Microfundo is working with every artist to produce a live recording. Every fan who joins Microfundo (and microfunds $25 towards any single artist campaign) will receive a download copy of that artist's live recording - PLUS every other live recording produced by Microfundo throughout the year.
We hope to create a great new way for you to discover (and own copies of) new music by some of the greatest talents playing today.
But in addition to getting all the above live recordings - including a new live recording by Alex and Mango Blue - if you join between now and January 1 - Alex will also send you a copy of his new studio CD as soon as it is released in 2010.
Please help Alex wrap up his last funding efforts (he's raised over $6,000 so far) and use the select box below to join Microfundo with a $25 membership - enabling you to get Alex's new CD, his new live recording and live recordings by every other Microfundo artist as they are produced throughout the next year.
Alex Alvear & Gonzalo Grau take you behind the scenes as they do post production work on Mango Blue's new recording.
Sofia Rei Koutsovitis has just recorded a fabulous new album 'Sube
Azul' - AND we have it for you exclusively thru Microfundo!! (see album storefront below...)
I could post the liner-note review in the usual
music-ese speak about the "fully formed immersion in modern and
progressive jazz while also responding to the pull of ancestry and the
appeal of organic, pan-musical connections..."
but i won't
instead
i'll say things like every now and then a truly worthy new voice comes
along. and I'll tell you that, listening to as much music as I do, this
is not an every day event - it's rare.
and that when most of us
think about music from South America our minds jump to Brazilian jazz
or Andean Pan Pipes. But these super popular styles have eclipsed and
hidden so many other beautiful styles - and it is this hidden realm
that Sofia is exploring.
Have a listen.
Then let me
know me if you can imagine that this fusion of Afro-Peruvian and
Argentinian music with jazz (most songs on the album are Sofia's) is
destined to emerge as vangard of a new South American music movement
(the next bossa nova...?)
One-of-a-kind moment!!
Sofia's
bassist, Jorge Roeder, also the producer of the new album, has just
been nominated for the Monk Jazz award this year (he might actually get
it) A bass player has never won this award before - so you get some
idea of how exceptional a player Jorge is.
So come on - you've
just been given the chance to help bring this awesomely crafted album
into the light of day. This is how Microfundo is supposed to work -
crowd sourcing rare and beautiful artists.
take a minute to listen to this music (you can sample all the songs below) and then share this with YOUR community - tell people about it using YOUR words...
Microfundo correspondent Amy Bracken talks with Kera Washington, bandleader for the Afro Caribbean group Zili Misik.
The all-women band Zili Misik is based in
Boston and only occasionally tours outside New England, but each of its songs
takes the listener on a long voyage through a spectrum of musical styles, and
even languages.
The band’s name comes from the strong female
Haitian spirit Ezili, and Haiti has the strongest presence in Zili’s songs, but
the eight-member band’s focus is much broader than that.
Washington: “We’re definitely not trying to be a Haitian band.
We’re not trying to represent ourselves as Haitian or as representative of
Haitian music. We are representative of African roots and of African Diaspora
coming together.”
That’s band leader Kera Washington.
Washington says such music has a particular resonance with her as an African
American, but she defines African Diaspora in the broadest way.
Washington: “All humanity started in Africa, so we’re
taking humanity as an African Diaspora.”
In addition to Haiti, Zili’s songs use
musical styles from Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Cape Verde, Brazil, Cuba, Israel,
and the US.
Zili band members have eclectic musical
backgrounds, and roots in the US, Trinidad, Japan, and the Philippines. English
is the native language of all the band’s vocalists, but listeners are often
fooled.
Washington: “Inevitably, someone will come up and ask okay
who’s from Haiti, who’s from brazil, okay, who’s from.. because I think the
assumption is if we’re interested in that music then it must be because we have
a personal connection, and there is a personal connection, but it’s not
necessarily a biological one. It’s definitely a cultural one.”
Washington is from California and grew up
moving around the US with her academic mom. Her mother got her into music early
– piano, flute, choir… she even played the bass for a bit. At Wellesley
College, she took music classes, but something was missing.
Washington: “I loved them, yet the music that I wanted to study
wasn’t always included in those classes. The music that I was most interested
in, this music of the Caribbean, folkloric music of the Caribbean was taught in
the black studies department, so I went and tried to find out why, and in
talking to one of the professors who became the chair, he told me about
ethnomusicology and how I could study this music as music, as part of the music
department.”
Washington began to work with Wellesley
Haitian ethnomusicology professor Gerdes Fleurant.
Washington: “When we first had those classes, he told me you
can’t understand music unless you’re inside it, unless you play it, unless you
experience it that way, and walk around campus walking in rhythm, you know?And
having three or four different rhythms in your head at the same time. You hear
things differently. You understand life differently.”
Fleurant taught Washington percussion, which
she now plays for Zili, and a fascination with Haiti.
Washington: “I feel a great connection to Haiti and also
to what Haiti has given this part of the hemisphere, this part of the world,
which we don’t think about often. We think about the poverty in Haiti, we think
about the political strife, we think about problems in Haiti. We don’t
generally think as a community about the richness of Haiti and the incredible
gifts of freedom that Haiti gave, particularly to the Diaspora.”
Beyond Haiti’s extraordinary history,
including a successful slave revolt that made it the world’s first black
republic, Washington pays tribute to its contribution to the arts. As a
graduate student at Wesleyan, she wrote about studying Haitian sacred music in
a secular context. Then, as a PhD student at Brown, she researched a Haitian
dance and music pioneer, whom she visits from time to time on the outskirts of
Port-au-Prince.
But even under the tutelage of Fleurant at
Wellesley, Washington’s learning went well beyond Haiti.
Washington: “Soit started out in Haiti, but then we
learned in my study with him about connections that Haiti had to all sorts of
musical styles you wouldn’t think of, and that opened up my study of
ethnomusicology and connection to other musical instruments and eventually led
to Zili.”
Zili formed nine years ago, when Washington
found the rest of the band through Craigslist and Berkeley School of Music. But
the influence of Fleurant and those early days at Wellesley is still evident in
Zili’s new album, which is called Zee’lee Mee’seek, spelled in English
phonetics.
Washington: “People really respond to Erzulie, which is funny
because it’s the oldest song that we have. I mean that’s the song we started
with when we started nine years ago in my living room, you know in Jamaica
Plain, in my three room apartment. We started jamming on Erzulie because it’s
the first song that my professor, Gerdes Fleurant, taught me, you know,
Erzulie, oh, Erzulie so, mwen pa genyen mama, mwen pa genyen papa. Yon sel
petit la mwen genyen. Li tombe nan dlo.”
Washington: “That’s the song that I think people respond to,
Erzulie, on this album, also Justice, which is an epic. Laught, it’s almost 9
minutes long. It starts out with a song from Zimbabwe, Nhemumasasa, so it uses
the mbira.”
“And then by the end of it we’re in the land
of reggae, so it travels many different places.”
Washington: “Our songs are political, our songs are historical,
and they have to do with love but they’re not necessarily love songs, so to
have a song like Kuma that speaks directly to love, or falling in love… how do
I know that I love you? I feel it in every beat of the drum. I feel it in your
smile, every line of your smile that I know is yours, you can continue to look,
but you know you’ve already found love… It’s not a typical Zili song.”
This love song, which is about Cape Verde,
grew out of a trip Washington took there on a grant for educators. She
currently teaches integrated arts at a Boston public elementary school, and is
on faculty at Wellesley as a dance and drum ensemble director.
Washington has been musically inspired by
her travels to Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and Israel’s West Bank.
Influences have also been brought by band members’ travels and contact,
locally, with musicians from around the world.
Washington: “We want to combine all of these musics to provide
a reconnection, to create a community that is heard in the music so that it’s
not lost, it doesn’t become a stew, where you can’t really identify different
musical styles but that you begin to hear all these different styles bumping up
against each other and moving together.”
This method of using multiple musical
styles, in a way that shows parallels and distinctions does elicit curiosity
about their origins, which is kind of what Washington is going for.
Washington: “I like that people can see themselves in this
music. I also like enjoy that when people who have no connection to Haiti, to
Cape Verde, to Brazil, to California, that they feel that connection and it
encourages them to go and find out why, find out about the music, find out,
outside of Zili, where it comes from, why are people involved in it, what’s it
performed for, what’s the tradition, what’s the culture, what’s it like?”
Now,
thanks to a new Boston-based collaboration between Microfundo and
Adva Mobile, aspiring musicians are getting a helping hand - from fans using
their mobile phones.
The idea is simple: Fans lend money via their mobile phone
to support music projects of their favorite musicians. Fans are then repaid via
revenue from future download sales of the artist’s music.
Musicians create their own mobile site that displays their
microfunding campaign. Musicians make direct appeals to fans at a concert or
live event. Fans can respond and contribute - in the moment – using their
phones.
Microfundo
CEO and founder Brad Powell got the idea bringing microfunding to the music
industry while working for Calabash Music, the online world-music company that
he also founded. “All of the artists I came into contact with faced the same
financial hurdle,” Powell says. “They needed capital. Most international
artists in particular are ignored by the mainstream music industry, which is a
significant hurdle.”
Powell
found a solution in one word: microfinance. He studied how international
microfinancing organizations like kiva.org arranged for investors to provide
funds and services to small businesses typically shunned by banks. He concluded
it would not be too hard to start something similar to support musicians.
“If
this is working well for people who are funding what are basically complete
strangers in a foreign land,” he said, “why wouldn’t it work for music fans to
fund artists whose music they actually know and like.”
Powell was inspired by Grameen phone which pioneered a mobile and microfinance service in Bangladesh. "In the 1990's all these local entrepreneurs were empowered to grow their business - simply because they were given acess to capital and mobile phones. With the way the youth of the world use their phones today, imagine the music economy that can thrive between artists and their fans via mobile?"
Adva
Mobile founder and CEO Jack Kelly added the key ingredient of taking music
microfinancing mobile: “Music fans are the alpha mobile users. They are
constantly sharing their experiences via text and twitter – it’s only natural
that they will share their love for their favorite musician via their phone.”
Fans
can get an early look at mobile microfinancing for musicians by texting
microfundo to GETME (43863) where the service is launched with four artists:
Alex Alvear, Ecuador –
text alexalvear to GETME – 43863 for his mobile campaign
Avantrio, Peru – text
avantrio to GETME – 43863
La Otrabanda,
Venezuela – text otrabanda to GETME – 43863
Zili Misik, Caribbean - text zilimisik to GETME - 43863
More About Microfundo:Microfundo is changing the way the world finances music by bringing
microfinancing to the music industry. Microfundo is supporting economic
development in music capitals around the globe with a Microfunding Platform
that allows music fans to give financial support directly to their favorite
artist. www.microfundo.com
More About Adva Mobile: Adva mobile provides a software
service that enables Music Artists and advertisers to create closer relations
with their audience through mobile fan clubs. The experience includes mobile
messaging, mobile presence (mobile internet pages), mobile commerce, mobile
social sharing features, and mobile content fulfillment. The service is free to
the fan, and a revenue generator to the band. www.advamobile.com
"There is something fundamentally brilliant about the Microfundo
mission to support independent musicians in developing countries - a
kind of brilliance that can also be viewed as kind of crazy. In places
where people still survive on the bare minimum, it seems
counter-productive to fund musical efforts when there is still a need
for basic amenities, job security, and sustainability."
"However,
Microfundo clearly recognizes food for the soul is as equally important
as food for the stomach. By supporting musicians and potentially
increasing their visibility on a global scale, we are raising awareness
on the issues of the countries that these musicians are natives of. We
are sending a clear interpretation of human rights that yes, not only
are we all entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and security - we are
also entitled to leisure and many different expressions of personality.
With Microfundo operating in conjuction with efforts like Kiva.org,
we will create a better and more holistic world - a song and message
that I hope gets stuck in my head for the rest of my life."
Microfundo
based it's business model on the highly successful Kiva.org, the first
online peer-to-peer microcredit marketplace. Kiva is one of the
fastest-growing nonprofits in history.
Kiva's online platform allows ordinary
people to invest in small enterprises in the
developing world. Users log on to the Web site
to read the personal accounts of Kiva's carefully chosen borrowers
and then use their PayPal accounts or credit cards to lend as
little as $25 to a borrower. Users would get their money
back over the course of a year, with the option of either relending
the money or pocketing it.
In April 2005, the founders e-mailed a
description of Kiva, its mission, and the
business people it currently sponsored to a
list of 300 friends. Within two days, the
organization had raised $3,500 and funded
all seven enterprises. Kiva had just become
the first online peer-to-peer microcredit
marketplace.
Would Kiva Work for Music? We find this a particularly inspiring story mainly because of the
immediacy of the response. The obvious question for us at Microfundo
was, 'would the Kiva microlending model work with musicians?'
In trying
to answer this question it was easy to imagine young bands breaking up
or having other difficulties before being able to repay any type of
loan. But then we hit upon an elegant solution: Place the recordings of
each carefully chosen artist/borrower into our online music download store (at Mondomix/Calabash) and use the
first revenue earned from the sale of downloads to repay each lender.
Lenders can help 'guarantee' their loan by inviting their friends to
buy the music of
the artist they've loaned.
So...
(drum roll please) we've just launched the first true peer-to-peer
microcredit marketplace for musicians on our new platform at Microfundo.com.
Choose a Musician, Lend, Get Repaid Anyone can choose an artist with a microfunding campaign and lend them
$25. Over the course of the next year you get your money back. Plus
you receive updates, and free songs and participate in the artist's
creative process.
We think this could become as popular as the
microlending at Kiva.
We're
launching our microcredit for musicians platform with the following
four artists. Kiva launched by sending an email to 300 people and had
their first 7 projects funded in two days. We're sending this
invitation to 20,000 people - is it possible that these four artist
could get their funding within two days?
You can change the way the world funds music...
The Microfundo mission is to support the entrepreneurial activities of
independent musicians from developing countries around the world -
championing undiscovered musicians who would otherwise not have the
means to develop their music careers.
As a typical curious kid I discovered the
amazing world of rhythm and music behind ordinary objects. As a
professional musician I just decided to keep having fun with it! It all
started ten years ago with a simple tin can trick: You start the
groove, you take it, you flip it over and you put it back to where it
was! Simple right? Just as simple as bouncing and catching a
basketball, sweeping the floor in 4/4 time or slapping your body while
stomping the ground. That is TEKEYE! A combination of sounds, stories
and grooves that explores the universal essence of Rhythm.
We grew up in an environment where rhythm is everywhere and comes
from so many different places and sources. Africa on the pacific coast,
the Caribbean up in the north, Brazil and the Andes in the south, the
plains on the east. All these influences made a huge impact on us, and
definitely make a difference to what TEKEYE is and projects. Every
sketch and rhythm carries not only the Colombian traditional roots, but
also the combination of everyone's own influences in the group.
We're coming to Boston from Columbia to perform at the New England
Conservatory. We need your help to get there! come play with us! -- group leader
Tupac Mantilla
Peruvian percussionist Jorge "Coqui"
Perez-Albela came up with the idea of forming a trio with two good
musician friends: Argentinean vocalist, Sofia Rei Koutsovitis and
Peruvian bassist, Jorge Roeder.
They were all studying in Boston, at
the Berklee College of Music and at the New England Conservatory
respectively. The initial goal was to perform the music of Peruvian
composers such as Chabuca Granda, Felipe Pinglo, Nicomedes, Santa Cruz;
introducing it to a new audience.
Besides their native language, Spanish, the trio also shared musical backgrounds in jazz, Latin American rock and folk styles.
Eventually, the project evolved from its initial all-Peruvian
acoustic trio concept into a melánge of South American folk styles from
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Uruguay. They have expanded
their sonic palette incorporating electronic tools and effects. Their
new goal is to complete a series of original compositions that will be
part of Avantrio's first recording project.
The three of them moved to the US seeking to learn jazz and
improvisation. In the process of digging deep into the music, they
found the source of their sound and much more. Avantrio has come full
circle into their roots, but this time with a refreshed perspective.
After years playing, writing, traveling and jamming with musicians from
all over the world, this journey continues as they are constantly
discovering and reinventing who they are.
We grew up in a part of the world where there
are two things that keep you from sleeping until late in the mornings:
the roosters and the omnipresent melodies usually coming from all
directions, even in the early morning hours. It's this music that
provides some relief from the tough and unpleasant routine of poverty.
Music provides respite: at least everyone has the power to choose
the radio station they hear during lunch, even when for some people
their plate of food looks the same every day. Music makes up a
fundamental part of daily life in Venezuela, and, in our experience,
throughout Latin America. When we say "music", we don't mean just
salsa, merengue and local folk music. We mean all the music that the
process of globalization and the strong influence of the so-called
"first world" have brought to us: rock, pop, jazz, etc...
Our musical journey is inspired by the
endurance and hope of the Venezuelan people, especially indigenous
people of our country. They always stuck in the middle of political
discourses but they still believe that a deserved positive change is
coming for them. Our songs are intended for encouragement, goodwill and
hope for all of us but they are specially dedicated to them. We want to
celebrate and promote the notion of respect and understanding that
indigenous cultures have with respect to our planet.
La Otrabanda (the other band) is a collective that was originally
formed by childhood friends from Cabudare, a small town in Venezuela.
Although the members of the collective reside in different countries
(Spain, Venezuela), we have joined efforts to share our Venezuelan-folk
inspired music that portrays the idiosyncrasy of our vibrant country in
a very fresh and optimistic way.
We are in the process of finalizing our first record entitled
Pueblo Vivo/ Vibrant people and we need your support to complete a
video for the song Salida to support the release of the upcoming album.
Your support would mean a lot to us and will help our music to reach
more people with our positive message that is ultimately what our
collective is about.
Hello, I am Alex Alvear and I am asking for
your support to help me record a new and very long-overdue album with
my band Mango Blue.
Music is made to be shared. We adore
performing live because there's nothing like that amazing short brush
with eternity one feels when making music for people in front of you.
Music has the power of bringing people together. Sometimes folks who
otherwise would not interact with each other come together even for a
moment, under the same roof, sharing a piece of their lives.
Nonetheless, the recording of an album is a very important part of the
culmination of a body of work. It allows the music to travel to places
and connect to people the band could not reach in the live performance
setting alone. It also provides possibilities for developing new
audiences, more gigs and a broader network. But most importantly, it
leaves a legacy of what has grown out of years of hard work, joy,
sacrifice, many challenges and tons of fun.
Perhaps the best thing about this particular independent recording
project is that there is no middle person, no broker, no record label
and NO COMPROMISE! Instead, it's a simple and direct transaction
between the artists and the people who love their work.
I sure hope you can be a part of this and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support.
Microfundo has been tweeting away for some time, although to be honest, we were rather late to the party. You can find us, and follow us @microfundo. please say 'hi'. Tweeting is fun it turns out, but the question remains just how useful is Twitter for the average musician?
On the other hand, Music Think Tank contributor, Bruce Warila suggests a music-industry-as-beach metaphor with music genres being coastlines and music tastemekers being beachfront property while individual artists are the grains of sand. You can imagin that when 5 million musicians are all using the same social media tools at the same time, their self-promotion tweets will be as welcome as sand in your sandwich.
What I've observed is that there are some remarkable channels for conversation on Twitter. For example: Kiva.org, which is a microfinance web site that allows people to lend small amounts of money to entrepreurs in developing countries, has a huge twitter conversation going on. People who lend tweet about it. They join teams and tweet about that. They promote the entrepreneur who they've just loaned money to. And if any corporation has a promotion which donates money to Kiva, they tweet about that.
Twitter also seems like a viral Olympian. for instance just a few days ago A REALLY COOL VIDEO featuring Bobby McFerrin was posted and within hours was being shared on Twitter by thousands (or tens of thousands). The interesting part is that this was a musical demonstration by McFerrin as part of a panel discussion at the World Science Festival - which normally could be fairly dry material. And here it was racing across the Twitter-sphere.
Twitter seems to have taken the 'everyone-as-journalist concept and put it on steriods with all participants hungry for something interesting to tweet about. So when something outstanding does show up it's broadcast far and wide instantly.
My takeaway for musicians is that Twitter has a large appetite for conversation pieces - something people want to share and talk about. So if you send up conversation starters -like kiva - which lots of people can believe in and get behind - or if you do something musically remarkable - like the McFerrin video - you win the game on Twitter because everyone else will be talking about you.
As a final Twitter note - Twitter was down today and this too became a big topic of conversation among all the recovering twitterholics. Here's just a few samples from #whentwitterwasdown: it almost cost my sidekick because i was about to break my phone!
I ACTUALLY considered going back to Myspace to ease the tension....
I checked myself into REHAB. Then I found out it was back up I checked out of REHAB
I wrote tweets on my whiteboard
people talked instead of tweeting
i had to live my life and not tweet about it... it felt weird. - Microfundo founder, Brad Powell
