Michael Zapruder - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Michael Zapruder is an American musician and songwriter. He lives in Oakland, California. He is an award-winning songwriter and recording artist, a co-founder of San Francisco's Howells Transmitter arts collective and record label, and the head curator for Pandora, the popular internet radio service.

Origins

Michael Zapruder was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Chevy Chase, MD. He is an alumnus of Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and Hamilton College, where he studied religion and music. He spent his junior year of college living in Nepal, studying Tibetan language and religion. Upon graduating, Zapruder moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he now lives. His siblings are both award-winning writers: American poet Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor. His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist , won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006...

and American author Alexandra Zapruder

Alexandra Zapruder

Alexandra Zapruder is the author Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust. The book is a compilation of 60 diaries of children who had survived the Holocaust. Zapruder, who was born in 1969, is married to Craig W. Dye, and resides in Washington, DC. Zapruder is a 1991 graduate of...

.

Initially self-taught in music, Zapruder has studied musicianship and theory at UC Berkeley and guitar, piano, voice and composition with private teachers. He has performed widely and toured the U.S. numerous times.

52 Songs

In 1999, Zapruder wrote, recorded and posted a song each week for a year, calling the project 52 Songs. During the year, Zapruder released a 5-song EP entitled Lomograph, and the following year assembled a compilation of songs from the project with the working title Bye Bye Beauty, which was never released. A few hundred CD copies of the full 52 Songs project were pressed and sold out and are now out of print.

This is a Beautiful Town

After completing 52 Songs, Zapruder taught himself piano and recorded the largely piano-based This is a Beautiful Town. The piano parts for the album were recorded on Neil Young

Neil Young

Neil Percival Young, OC, OM is a Canadian singer-songwriter who is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of his generation...

's piano at his Broken Arrow Ranch. Zapruder began touring after the completion of this recording, covering the US three times in two years.

New Ways of Letting Go

In the mid 2000s, Zapruder and some close allies created the Howells Transmitter collective and record label, through which Zapruder released New Ways of Letting Go, an orchestral folk album with a large ensemble called Rain of Frogs. The album was recorded partly by Zapruder and his studio partner Jon Bernson

Jon Bernson

Jon Bernson is an American singer, songwriter and recordist from San Francisco, California.For eight years, Bernson led the indie-folk band Ray's Vast Basement and developed a multimedia approach that is frequently referred to as 'musical fiction'...

(Ray's Vast Basement, Exray's), and finished in collaboration with Scott Solter

Scott Solter

Scott Solter is a recording engineer, record producer, mixer, remixer and musician. As a producer and mixer, Solter has worked with numerous indie rock artists, including John Vanderslice, Superchunk, Okkervil River, The Mountain Goats, Erik Friedlander, The Balustrade Ensemble, Pattern is...

. Zapruder toured widely for this release, including appearances at South by Southwest

South by Southwest

South by Southwest is an Austin, Texas based company dedicated to planning conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. Their current roster of annual events include: SXSW Music, SXSW Film, SXSW Interactive, SXSWedu, and SXSWeco and take place every spring in Austin, Texas, United States...

and Pop Montreal

Pop Montreal

Pop Montreal is an annual music festival occurring in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in the early fall, usually at the end of September or the beginning of October. More than 400 acts are scheduled to play in more than 50 venues across the city, mostly located in the Mile End area...

Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope

In 2009, Zapruder again teamed up with Scott Solter

Scott Solter

for a two-week session at John Vanderslice

John Vanderslice

John Vanderslice is an American musician and songwriter. Previously a member of the band Mk Ultra, he now records and performs as a solo artist.-Early years:...

's Tiny Telephone studio, during which the album, Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope was recorded and mixed in its entirety. Released by SideCho Records

SideCho Records

SideCho Records is an independent record label based in Long Beach, California. It has been around since at least 2003, but doesn't list a history on its website.-Artists:* Those Mockingbirds* Peachcake* Charlemagne* Neva Dinova* The Pale Pacific...

, Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope won the 2009 Independent Music Award for Best Folk/Singer-Songwriter Album. For the release, Zapruder teamed up with video director Jesse Ewles

Jesse Ewles

Jesse James Ewles is a Canadian independent visual artist in Toronto, Canada.He has directed music videos for the bands Grizzly Bear, Of Montreal and Owen Pallett. In January of 2010, he completed his first short film for Bravo! TV entitled Kingdom of Frogs...

(Grizzly Bear, Final Fantasy) to produce a video for Ads for Feelings http://vimeo.com/1453976.

Pink Thunder

In 2010, Zapruder completed work on the Pink Thunder project. Pink Thunder is a collection of free verse pop art-songs made from the poems of more than twenty contemporary American poets. Contributors include Noelle Kocot

Noelle Kocot

Noelle Kocot is an American poet. She is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including most recently, The Bigger World and Sunny Wednesday . She has also recently published a limited-edition collection of translations of the poems of Tristan Corbière, as Poet By Default...

, James Tate

James Tate

James Tate may refer to:* James Tate , Headmaster of Richmond School 1796–1833)* James "Honest Dick" Tate , State Treasurer of Kentucky...

, Bob Hicok

Bob Hicok

-Life:Hicok is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. He is from Michigan and before teaching owned and ran a successful automotive die design business...

, David Berman

David Berman

David Berman may refer to:*David Berman , actor and researcher on the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation*David Berman , American singer-songwriter, poet, and cartoonist, member of the band Silver Jews...

, D. A. Powell

D. A. Powell

-Life and career:Powell lived in various places growing up, then graduated high school from Lindhurst High School in Linda, California. He then worked in a number of jobs before eventually settling in Santa Rosa, California, where he attended Sonoma State University. He earned a bachelor's degree...

, and Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort is an Belarusian poet who now lives in the United States. Her first book of poetry, I'm as Thin as Your Eyelashes, came out in Belarus in 2005. In 2004 in Slovenia she received a Crystal Vilencia Award for best poetry performance...

. Zapruder composed, produced and sang on the recordings, which feature instrumental contributions from more than forty other musicians, including Nate Brenner TUnE-YaRdS

Tune-Yards

tUnE-yArDs is the music project of New England native Merrill Garbus. When performing live, Garbus creates drum loops on the spot, and layers these with ukulele, voice, and electric bass...

, Ava Mendoza, Marc Capelle, and Tom Griesser.

Pink Thunder will be released in 2012.

Pink Thunder Portmanteaus

At the 2011 AWP conference in Washington DC, Zapruder debuted his portmanteuas, a multimedia release format for some of the Pink Thunder recordings. In collaboration with electronic designer Marc Allen-Piccolo, Zapruder embedded single tracks from the Pink Thunder project into ten identical pink plinth bases, on top of which rest found objects representing some aspect from the poems to which they correspond. These objects were hosted by ten participating publishers at the conference.

1924 Franklin is a Car

Since 2004 Zapruder has shared a small recording studio with songwriter Jon Bernson

Jon Bernson

called 1924 Franklin is a Car. This space has been the main location for many recording projects and the site of many impromptu sessions. Other recording credits for the studio include work with Scott Pinkmountain, Black Fiction, The Lovely Public, Gene V. Baker, Anamude, P.A.F. and Raised By Spacemen.

Howells Transmitter

Zapruder is a founding member of the Howells Transmitter http://www.howellstransmitter.com arts collaborative and record label. Other principal members include Jennifer Welch, John Bernson and Colin Held. Howells Transmitter is home to a stylistically diverse group of artists: Charles Atlas, The Fresh and Onlys, Michael Zapruder's Rain of Frogs, Black Fiction, Scott Pinkmountain, Window Twins, Ray's Vast Basement, Modular Set and contributors to the Wiretap Music Compilation. Howells Transmitter has produced numerous plays and poetry readings, in addition to its musical endeavors.

Pandora

Michael Zapruder is Pandora's head music curator. He directs the team that is responsible for research, evaluation, and acquisition of content for Pandora as well as for maintenance and improvement of various Pandora stations. He is a senior member of the music operation (Music Genome Project) team, and provides musicological perspectives as a member of the playlist improvement group, which designs and tests the algorithms used to make Pandora stations.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.