Bio:
Since 1990, Kot has been the music critic at the Chicago Tribune, where he has comprehensively covered popular music --- from hip-hop to rock en español --- and reported on music-related social, political and business issues (see his daily blog, Turn it Up, at the chicagotribune.com web site).
With Jim DeRogatis, Kot cohosts Sound Opinions, "the world's only rock 'n' roll talk show," on national public radio. The show has a worldwide audience via its web site, soundopinions.org, and is nationally syndicated through its home base at Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ-FM 91.5.
The show’s guests have included Radiohead, Yoko Ono, Arcade Fire, Peter Bogdanovich, Mission of Burma, Tom Petty, Anthony Bordain, Laurie Anderson, Jon Brion, John Cale, the Strokes and Cameron Crowe.
Kot’s books include Wilco, “Learning How to Die” (Broadway Books), “Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music,” (Scribner) and “I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers and the March up Freedom’s Highway” (Scribner).
He also coauthored “The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones: Sound Opinions on the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Rivalry” (Voyageur Press) with DeRogatis.
His music criticism and journalism also has appeared in Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Cash: By the Editors of Rolling Stone,” "Harrison: A Rolling Stone tribute to George Harrison," "The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock" and "The Rolling Stone Album Guide."
A longtime contributor to Rolling Stone, Kot has written for a dozen national publications, including Details, Blender, Entertainment Weekly, Men's Journal, Guitar World, Vibe and Request. He blames Ira Robbins, Jack Rabid and Greil Marcus for his lifelong obsession with music and music-writing.
In his spare time, Kot is a youth basketball coach, and is proud to say that both his daughters survived his coaching and went on to lead happy and productive lives (so far, at least). He and his partners operate Over the Edge, a travel-team program based in Chicago that prepares grade-school athletes to compete at a high school level with an emphasis on the game’s fundamentals. For more information, visit overtheedgehoops.com. With his fellow Over the Edge coach Keith Miniscalco, Kot is coauthor of “Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball” (Human Kinetics).
Kot has lived on Chicago's Northwest Side through numerous character-building winters with his wife, Deb, two daughters and far too many records.
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).