Album Notes

Led by 29-year-old composer, producer, bass player, and anthropologist Rodrigo Ferrari Nunes, the Bias Project #1 is a Brazilian tribute to great composers and improvisers of the jazz past such as Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. Two original tracks by contemporary Brazilian composers Hermeto Pascoal and Sandro Haick are also featured with the purpose of revealing beforehand the future directions in which Rodrigo’s music is evolving, since this is a project meant to link the common multicultural roots that have influenced the players that have been cherry-picked to participate in this celebration.

The principal criteria behind Rodrigo’s mind while making his production choices were a strong desire to help expose to a larger audience the musical richness of the São Paulo instrumental scene, the possession of rhythmic and melodic inventiveness by the players, personality and original uniqueness instead of mimicry, ease and effortlessness soloing over and navigating advanced chord changes. Another very important ideological imperative guiding this project is the absolute independence from any so-called “guidance” provided by outside people such as record company executives or marketeers. The musicians themselves are making every single decision in this very complex production - from recording techniques and arrangements to mixing.
Several instruments and different players are featured apart from Rodrigo on 6-string electric basses: tenor, alto and soprano saxophones come to life through the hands of Vinicius Dorin, a member of Grammy nominated Mantiqueira Big Band, and also of the Hermeto Pascoal group for over a decade, having performed in several international Jazz festivals throughout the World for over more than 30 years of his professional career.
Multi-instrumentalist Sandro Haick, Rodrigo’s closest associate and musical mentor, virtually unknown to the American public and considered one of the most important improvisational and compositional geniuses of recent Brazilian history, is featured in several tracks on drums, semi-acoustic guitars, fender rhodes, acoustic piano and melodica.
On flugelhorn and trumpet, the Bias Project #1 features the experienced young lion Daniel D’Alcântara, described by a recent reviewer as demonstrating “the depth of his talent”, with “mellifluous effect” and displaying, “through changes of meter and mood with cup muting, triple tonguing straight-ahead force”.
Cuban-born and graduated pianist and percussionist Pepe Rodriguez adds yet another rhythmic and melodic dimension to this coherent Latin mix, with mesmerising performances both as lead pianist is most tunes, and as a drummer in Sandro Haick’s tune “Marmelada”. Another special guest feature is master Brazilian drummer Cuca Teixeira, an experienced multi-style drummer with 2 best-selling instructional drum videos, who is currently touring with Elis Regina’s daughter Maria Rita.
Rodrigo Ferrari Nunes was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, where he was exposed to many different musical traditions, styles and rhythms. At age 16, only a few years after he began studying bass as an autodidact, he signed a contract with the American record company RoadRunner Records, and ended up recording in multi-platinum studio Sound City, in Van Nuys, California, where he closely observed producer Sylvia Massy at work and began learning the techniques that would lead him to produce his own recordings.
After 6 years with the band Toyshop, having played all kinds of gigs from TV networks to 20k people festivals and small clubs throughout Brazil and also in California and Italy, Rodrigo felt that he had developed beyond his fellow band members into the world of improvisation. After he began independently, at age 18, the gradual discovery of this richer new World of instrumental and improvised music, he began developing his musicianship further under the tutelage of Sandro Haick, and left the world of Rock with its ready-made formulae, freeing himself for good from the uncreative constrictions imposed by greedy and ill-informed record company executives and bureaucrats.
The Bias Project #1 was his first instrumental recording as a producer and jazz artist, which he released independently in December 2005. His next album, entitled Xaropérlex, was finished in August 2006, and features only original compositions by Rodrigo Ferrari Nunes himself, Hermeto Pascoal, and Sandro Haick, and should be available by December 2006.