Ariadne’s Notes: the World Poetry Café Radio Show with hosts Ariadne Sawyer and Neall Ryon , super tech, Victor Schwartzman and special volunteer Sharon Rowe welcomed Grammy Nominee Wayne Wallace to the show on December 22, 1-2 pm to talk about the nominated CD Canto America and the tapestry of artists and features in this amazing CD.
TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW, CLICK HERE!
PERCUSSIONIST MICHAEL SPIRO AND TROMBONIST WAYNE WALLACE’S Canto América EARNS GRAMMY® NOMINATION FOR “BEST LATIN JAZZ ALBUM”!
“Simply put, Canto América is a certified masterpiece – one of the most aurally-arresting and culturally-distinctive recordings in recent memory.” – Mark Holston, Latino Magazine.com
World-renowned trombonist Wayne Wallace and percussionist Michael Spiro have earned a GRAMMY ® nomination for “Best Latin Jazz Album” for their CD Canto América on the Patois label.
The Grammy Awards ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 12, 2017. “We are extremely proud of this recording, and would like to take the opportunity to personally thank the Academy and all of the musicians who participated in the making of this project,” say Spiro and Wallace. Wallace, Spiro and La Orquesta Sinfonietta (consisting of 35 performers, many of whom are affiliated with Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music where Wallace and Spiro teach) weave a colorful tapestry of classic-to-modern rhythms – bolero to timba, Haitian petro to Cuban rumba, mambo to guiro – refreshed by traditional and newly composed compositions, along with surprising treatments of 20th-century standards.
San Francisco native Wayne Wallace has collaborated with artists ranging from Count Basie to Stevie Wonder, Sonny Rollins to Carlos Santana, Tito Puente to Lena Horne and Aretha Franklin – as sideman, composer, arranger, and producer. His debut album as a leader, 2000’s Three In One (Spirit Nectar), showcased his writing skills and his encyclopedic knowledge of Afro-Cuban rhythms, the result of years of music-making in the close-knit Bay Area jazz community, where Wallace has played an oversized role. He has earned particular notice for his approach to Latin Jazz, a vision shaped by his work with Latin Jazz percussion giants Pete Escovedo and John Santos, in whose Machete Ensemble he served as music director for more than 20 years. This is the eighth time that Wallace — a San Francisco native who splits his time between the Bay Area and the Midwest where he’s a professor at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music — has been on a GRAMMY nominated album.
Michael Spiro has performed on each of those nominated albums – a mere fraction of the literally hundreds of wide-ranging albums on which he has worked, which include GRAMMY-nominated albums by John Santos, pianist Mark Levine, and vocalist Karrin Allyson. He has also performed with Ella Fitzgerald, Carlos Santana, and McCoy Tyner. Internationally recognized for his expertise and his exploration of African and Latin rhythms, he has authored three books on Afro-Caribbean percussion. The first album under his own name, BataKetu (with Mark Lamson), released in 1996, was named by DRUM! Magazine as one of the “Top 50 Drum Records” of all time.
Wallace and Spiro met more than 30 years ago in San Francisco, forging a personal and professional relationship tempered by their shared interest in the music of Cuba. In 2008, Spiro joined the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at IU, and under his direction the percussion department grew from its emphasis on orchestral work to include the world’s rhythms. He soon began leading a Latin Jazz big band at the school, which used many of Wallace’s acclaimed arrangements, which led to a guest appearance with the band — and eventually to the school hiring Wallace as a professor in 2013.
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