What's Up?
Curating music for Ropeadope LLC and beyond.
Life & Work
Bio:
With a background in the clothing business, Louis Marks came to music by creating apparel lines and commerce stores for labels and artists including Ropeadope, Blue Note, Daptone, The Roots, and many more. As the CEO of Ropeadope, Marks brings a progressive method to the music business, demonstrating the collective power of a community of independent artists.
Founded in 1999, Ropeadope held a reputation as a progressive label with releases from DJ Logic, Charlie Hunter, Tin Hat Trio, and The Philadelphia Experiment. From 2013 to 2021 Ropeadope released over 450 albums garnering Nine Grammy nominations, at least one in each year since 2016.
Little known new artists mingle with established names like Terrace Martin, Eddie Palmieri, Ramsey Lewis, and Christian Scott Atunde Adjuah within the Ropeadope community.
In 2017 Marks launched 21Soul, a direct to fan media platform designed to bring real discussion about music to the people. In 2020 Ropeadope successfully tested the first NFT for Vinyl records, attaching proof of ownership to every copy of The Philadelphia Experiment 20th Anniversary reissue.
Future plans include continued growth of the Artist network, creative use of NFT’s to empower artists, and continued development of music and talk videos and podcasts with top artists.
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).