NYC

21

21 was born in 2013 as an improvised music series designed to break down the walls between artists in New York City.  As the small scale local version of Just Play, in December of 2013, Geraghty created 21 brand new bands in consecutive 21 days featuring more than 43 world class musicians from 20 different countries.  21 was filmed and directed by Laura Newman and it was during the project Matt invited in Brazilian producer, saxophonist, flautist Zé Luis as both a player and advisor to the project. Their only rule? Just Play. Watch the full series.

Farah Siraj, a singer from Jordan, joins Brazilian percussionist Thomaz de Castro to explore merging the music of Jordan and Brazil with guitarist Jake Hertzog and percussionist Marito Marques from Portugal. This is the first time most us had even met, let alone played with each other.

The finale of 21 takes a twist on our theme of improvised music collaboration and brings together electronic music producer David Block of The Human Experience, with NYC based filmmaker and editor Laura Newman, to make a fully produced/mastered track and music video. Day 21 took the improvised pieces from the musicians from Day 16 (Danny Musengo, Adriano Santos, Victor Provost and Matt Geraghty) for this remix and video.

Yacouba Sissoko is a master Kora player from Mali. Rez, originally from Pakistan, is a guitarist who blends jazz with Asian influences. Together with Matt and Thomaz de Castro on tabla and berimbau, they created their first improvised composition. Soon after, they realized this was likely the first time this instrumentation might have been played together — kora, jazz guitar, berimbau, tabla and upright bass. They call this piece 'Time to Time.'

This morning at 9am only one musician was confirmed to play with Matt, five-time Grammy winner Mark Walker. Luckily guitarist Prasanna had just flown in from Mumbai, India that morning and responded immediately to a message from Matt that he was down to do a session in the afternoon. Prasanna plays the South Indian musical art form of Carnatic music on the electric guitar. Finishing off the quartet is flautist Zé Luis who with only one hour notice, left a Bar Mitzvah to join us. They call this 'Winter Solstice.

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