Bio:
I was born in New York City and grew up in Huntington, New York. As a kid I secretly wanted to be a rock musician, but I had no musical ability whatsoever. At the time, I figured the next best thing would be to design album covers – to my surprise, that’s what I ended up doing.
I studied drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, filmmaking, and animation at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After graduation I did editorial illustration for New York Magazine, Esquire, The New York Times, The Whole Earth Review, and Ms. Magazine, among other publications. I entered the world of graphic design through economic necessity – starting at the bottom, with paste-up and typesetting.
A staff job at the Arica Institute ended when the art department was dissolved, and my two fellow designers (Pat Gorman and Patti Rogoff) were convinced we should start our own studio. I was reluctant but feared a real job more than the unknown.
We rented a tiny corner in the back of The School of T’ai Chi in Greenwich Village and filled it with drafting tables, a photostat camera, and other equipment purchased from Arica. We named our studio Manhattan Design, and began with nothing but faith and innocence. We explored our youthful creativity, loved and almost killed each other, and made a living. We learned a lot, worked real hard, got taken advantage of, and met some cool people. We had our own way – one of my partners used to say that we weren’t housebroken. Most of our work was for the music and entertainment industry, and our most famous creation was the chameleonlike logo and original “look” of MTV; Music Television.
During this time I began teaching illustration at Parsons School of Design and came up with the idea for What The Songs Look Like: Contemporary Artists Interpret Talking Heads Songs, the book I put together with David Byrne. I also became the founding art director of Tricycle: the Buddhist Review.
After 12 years, Manhattan Design was dissolved. I was creatively burned out and emotionally drained. I needed a break and took a short trip to India. When I returned I had absolutely no plans. Almost immediately some former clients began calling me at home offering me design work. Since then I have worked independently.
For the past twenty-one years, I have continued to design CD packaging and have worked on all sorts of other things including my second book, Buddha Book: A Meeting of Images.
This website shows the range of my work. I am always interested in new and challenging projects. Please contact me at [email protected] for further information or requests.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Art Director, Graphic Designer, Illustrator. Formerly: Co-Founder/Partner Manhattan Design. Co-creator of the cameleonlike logo and original look of MTV. Designer of album packages for The Smashing Pumpkins, Talking Heads, R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Sonic Youth, Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet and many others. Founding art director of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Books published: What The Songs Look Like: Contemporary Artists Interpret Talking Heads Lyrics and Buddha Book: A Meeting of Images. Awards include: CLIO, Print, Society of Illustrators. Featured: Time, NY Times, Graphis, Rolling Stone, American Illustration.
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).