What's Up?
The most influential people in my career have included masters and mentors from other cultures along with notables from our nations creative resources. Blending methods of artistic expression from many different cultures and art mediums, my projects are a mix of performance and visual arts workshops that foster a sense of pride in a child's culture as well as an appreciation of the diversity and unifying themes of many cultures.
My vision for our youth is that all children be given the opportunity to experience art at an early age. Having had an extremely full exposure to art as a child gave me the mindset to create and develop artistic alternatives and opportunities for youth in my community. For my students in general I want to provide them with a sense of self and an open-minded view of art as a holistic web that you can weave throughout your life.
I have used this process as a major positive life skill for myself and I hope future students will allow me the opportunity to use the traditional approach of passing it down.
Life & Work
Bio:
Personal:
Bobby Fouther is a second-generation artist and a second generation Oregonian, born on Labor Day and raised in a house full of creativity. Bobby strives to use his gifts on a daily basis to improve his community.
Visual:
After 20 years of live performance work Mr. Fouther has revived his visual art projects as a way of continuing to dance on the page and as a source of fundraising for his creative work with children.
Based at a local school in his community Mister Bobby, as his students fondly call him, teaches through a creative process that allows the student to become successful as well as understand the entrepreneurial aspects of the art world.
Currently Mr. Fouther, a 2009 “Spirit of Portland” award winner has shown artwork in city hall and continually has featured work with “ColoredPencils:Arts & Culture Night” a New Portland project sponsored by the City of Portland’s Office of Human Relations as well as locations and events throughout the metropolitan area.
Performance:
Bobby Fouther's career in the Northwest spans over forty years of artistic expression. Of primary focus is his lifelong goal of bringing communities together through the arts. Having filled the rolls of producer, director, performer, designer, exhibitor and teacher, his work has influenced thousands of students, peers and audiences in communities throughout the United States.
For many years, this former Portland State University faculty member and current instructor for Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Outreach Programs has served as an artist-in-education for statewide artist residency programs sponsored by the Oregon, Washington and Idaho Arts Commissions and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Mr. Fouther has also served on curriculum development committees for the Children’s Museum, The World Affair’s Council of Oregon, Portland Public Schools and White Bird Dance.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).