Canadian Musician - September/October 2020 | Page 52

PHOTO: JEN SQUIRES
R. Grunwald
niques with veteran jazz drummer
Jerry Granelli. “It seems like a long
journey,” he says, but he sums it
up succinctly, saying: “When I first
started playing the piano, I was
really inspired by The Beatles and
then Billy Preston. From Billy Preston
I learned about Stevie Wonder,
and through him I learned about
Duke Ellington…”
Going forward from there, we
cover a lot of ground: Dourado’s
classical training with a teacher
who could tell he was using the
wrong finger even when he was
practicing in a different room; his
indie, classic rock, and punk influences;
his reverence for Mingus,
Monk, Mary Lou Williams, and Art
Tatum, among others.
But we also talk about issues
surrounding the music industry
and race, questions of consent
and the recording/appropriation
of ethnic musical traditions, and
the potency of music as a revolutionary
force, among other things.
“My parents weren’t born in Canada,”
he says at one point. “They
came here from Goa, but my dad
grew up in Tanzania and my mom
grew up mostly in Mumbai, so for
that reason, I was always really
curious about the music from the
rest of the world.”
Even so, Dourado had a
revelatory moment about race
and music relatively late in his
musical education, owing to an
elective course in jazz history he
took while studying engineering at
Dalhousie University.
It’s something he brings up
during an interview posted at
Musicworks.ca with writer, musician,
and composer Nick Storring,
and, as Storring notes in his piece,
that took place during a lecture
“delving into slavery, slave music,
and North American racial politics.”
As Dourado says to Storring:
“I knew about jazz, James Brown,
Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder,
but I didn’t get that it was all an
artifact of some of the hardest shit
that people ever went through in
the world.”
Revelation, Inspiration &
Self-Examination
These are some of the words
Michael Kaeshammer
52 CANADIAN MUSICIAN