Sindicato Creativo is a world-class production team, featuring four-time Grammy®-nominated producer Greg Landau, Grammy®-winning engineer John Greenham, Grammy®-nominated producer Hector "Hecdog" Perez and producer/musician Camilo Landau.
Each one of us brings contrasting and complimentary talents and perspectives to the production process in a creative and technical process that has yielded an impressive and prolific body of work. Our workflow and dynamic has developed through collaboration on countless projects.
Bios
Greg Landau
Greg Landau is an award-winning music/video producer, educator and music historian with a doctorate from UC San Diego's prestigious School of Communication. Over the last 15 years he has produced three Grammy nominated CD's and among the over 50 CDs, film sound tracks and videos. He has worked with reknowned artists including: Patato Valdes, Buena Vista Social Club's Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, Susan Baca, Bobi Cespedes, Dr. Loco, Pete Seeger, Omar Sosa, John Santos, Pancho Quinto, Quetzal, Los Mocosos, Maldita Vecindad and David Byrne's record label Luaka Bop, Vanguard Records, Six Degrees and many others.
Landau has produced a lot of local Bay Area groups such as Francisco Herrera, Fuga, Sambada, The Creole Belles, Goodfeather, La Ventana, Manicato, Carne Cruda and others. Currrently Greg is recording a new CD with Omar Sosa and Susana Baca, featuring songs by the legendary Cuban singer, Bola de Nieve. In March 2009, he finished recording and producing a series of three CD's with Peruvian singer Susana Baca. This project represents a new phase in Baca's career as togethor they explored the deep roots of Peruvian popular music and the poetry of the revolutionary movements of the 1970's.
Recently Greg Landau, Babatunde Lea, and John Greenham composed and produced "The African Diaspora Suite" for a permanent installation in the newly built Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. He also collaborated with performance artist Guillermo Gomez Peña and video artist Gustavo Vasquez on a video to be premiered at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the soundtrack for Gomez Peña's latest bus performance tour of the Mission District.
During the 1980's he toured internationally as a guitarist and tresero with the reknowed Nicaraguan Nueva Cancion group, Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy and Mancotal, and shared stages with Silvio Rodriguez, Pablo Milanes, Mercedes Sosa, Chico Buarque, Amparo Ochoa and Nicomedes Santa Cruz in music festivals and concerts all over Latin America and Europe. Landau lived and worked in Nicaragua's Minsitry of Culture, The Nicaraguan Community Radio Network and the Folkloric Research Department where he did extensive research into Nicargua's folk music.
Over the last two decades, Greg has worked extensively with Oscar winning filmaker Haskell Wexler and with his father, Saul Landau making documentary films in Latin America. He has been the Music Supervisor for 10 films, including the recent feature film starring Benjamin Bratt, "La Mission." He has also done extensive cultural research in Latin America and has recieved a doctorate in Communication from the prestigious University of California, San Diego.
Greg Landau is a multi-faceted artist who has worked in many areas of media production from broadcast media to web-based streaming video and computer telephony. His production credits include work for PBS, Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., CNN, Lucas Film, Six Degrees Records, McDonald's and StarMedia. As Executive Producer at Starmedia, he has produced videos with Christina Aguilera, Carlos Santana, Los Lobos, Sub-Comandante Marcos and many others.
Greg currently teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz and San Francisco City College. In addition, he also continues his professional work producing music and videos while pursuing reseach about the role of music in contemporary societies.
Hector "Hecdog" Perez
Hailing from the award-winning Hamilton High Music Academy in Los Angeles, and born to a family of musicians, Hecdog's musical life took form at an early age. As a teenage lead jazz trombonist, Pérez shared the stage with legends such as Henri Mancini, Dizzy Gillespie, and Doc Severinsen. His Academy band mates are current members of Ozomatli, Green Day and Paul McCartney’s band.
His professional career started at A&M Records assisting on sessions for Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in Music and Engineering, Pérez went on to become the chief recording engineer for UC Berkeley’s music department. In 1996, he was hired as a composer and sound designer for Michael Boyd Music, an award-winning national commercial music production company, where his talent was put to good use. After four years of composing music for clients such as Coca Cola, Nike, Reebok, Levi's, and Chrysler, Pérez was promoted to Creative Director of west-coast operations for MBM, where he learned the inside game of the very complex music production and licensing business.
In 2002, with a Clio™ and an Oscar™-nominated film under his belt, Hecdog launched a new music company, Music Orange, in San Francisco, CA. He scored films for HBO and PBS, while continuing his many TV commercial projects. Music Orange, now the largest music production house in the city, scores over 100 TV spots a year. If you watch TV, chances are you’ve heard his music.
Although Pérez has plenty of composing, mixing and production experience, he has always fed his hunger for live performance. He was a founding member of the bay area afro-latin hip-hop band, O-Maya—voted Best of the Bay 2003 (SF Weekly). Additionally, his underground studio band, MOX, was signed to RGB records in 1998 for a 3-album deal. Recently, Hecdog has been applying his commercial production method to produce bands. His current work includes mixing and music production for Maldita Vecindad’s new 2009 album.
In joining the new Bay Area creative team, Sindicato Creativo, Hecdog adds an inventive and professional music production technique, which allows artists the access to the world of commercial music licensing and TV placement.
John Greenham
Greenham has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since moving from the UK in 1983. He was a member of the mastering team at Paul Stubblebine Mastering in San Francisco. Greenham is also known for his work with Stephen Jarvis' Area 51 Mastering. He has applied his craft to countless projects for artists such as Kelly Rowland, John Vanderslice, Two Gallants, Queensryche, Bettye Lavette, multiple Grammy-winning Los Tigres del Norte and the Latin Grammy nominated Pamela Rodriguez.
Camilo Landau
Camilo Landau began playing guitar and tres at the age of twelve when his uncle record producer Greg Landau returned from Nicaragua and taught him. During his studies of music and film at School of the Arts in San Francisco under the direction of Wayne Wallace and Malecio Magdaluyo, Camilo performed with Carlos Santana at the age of sixteen. He studied guitar and tres in Cuba with Gorge “Chino” Triana and Palo de Mayo in Nicaragua with Philip Montavalo. While attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, he started a Latin and Caribbean band, Carne Cruda, and played in the UCSC Jazz Ensembles with trumpeter Ray Brown, and he graduated with a degree in Community Studies and a minor in Music. Camilo "con su estilo" Landau lives in Oakland and plays with LaTiDo, AguaLibre, Carne Cruda, La Mixta Criolla, Dave and the Diamonds, The Los Shoegazers, The Cuban Cowboys, and more. He has performed or recorded with Susana Baca, Omar Sosa, Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band, Quetzal, Ozomatli, Los Lobos, Benito Sereno, Batista, Sambada, Los Mocosos, Fito Reynoso, Arturo Ortega, Santero, Los Compas, John Santos, The Ska Messengers, Medusa, Edgardo y Candela, Bobi Cespedes, Maldita Vecindad, John Santos, Vission Latina, Los Cojolites, Domingo Siete, Jesus Diaz, Francisco Herrera, Azabache, Nina Serrano, Pamela Rodriguez, Burning Star, Stevie Wonder, Carlos Santana, and many more.
