Bio:
Booty shaking party music best sums up the inimitable Papa Grows Funk, one of the most successful funk bands to emanate from New Orleans. Rooted in improvisation, the group of all-star musicians led by Hammond B3 keyboardist and lead vocalist, John Gros, has built its enthusiastic vibe on a long-standing musical tradition that dates back to the hot jazz of the legends, Fats Domino and Louis Armstrong. Like Dr. John and the Neville Brothers, Papa Grows Funk keeps that New Orleans lineage alive while always funkifying towards the future.
Papa Grows Funk has fused the individual talents of its members into one unique sound, but still retains the first spark they ignited in the beginning while jamming together at the Old Point Bar. “While we throw in New Orleans classics, now our songs and our groove are all our own,” says John Gros. “We still love playing together and that comes through in our music.”
The band plays over 100 shows a year for its international and growing fan base. From the Highline Ballroom in New York City to the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, from the Nancy Jazz Festival in France to the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, Papa Grows Funk has brought their “Mardi Gras in a bottle” music to iconic clubs from coast to coast and renowned festivals worldwide.
With no play lists and no rehearsals every Papa Grows Funk performance is its own masterpiece of funk. On any given night, the band might change songs or grooves. But one thing is certain: whether it is jam band college kids or seersucker wearing professionals, five folks or 100,000, after John Gros announces “We’re Papa Grows Funk from the great city of New Orleans,” the crowd is going to go wild.
John Gros – Hammond B3 organ and lead vocals
June Yamagishi- Guitar, backing vocals
Marc Pero – Bass
Jason Mingledorff – Saxophones, backing vocals
Jeffery “Jellybean” Alexander – Drums, backing vocals
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“One of THE best and most important funky bands in New Orleans. We couldn’t be prouder.”
- Quint Davis, producer of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
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).