Bio:
Roy Nathanson has a varied career as a saxophonist, composer, band-leader, actor and teacher. He is leader and principal composer of the Jazz Passengers, which he co-founded with Curtis Fowlkes in 1987.
He has scored works for PBS, and films by Jacob Burkhardt and Tamara Jenkins as well as numerous theater productions for playwright Roy Dobbins and others.
He has written children’s songs for the HBO series Happily Ever After. Several of his songs were featured in Karole Armitage’s adaptation of “Sheherazade” at the Florence Opera House, and songs that he has written or arranged have appeared in Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts and Chantal Akerman’s Histoires D’Amerique.
He scored the animated film JOY STREET directed by Suzan Pitt which premiered at the New York Film Festival in October ’95.
The Fire at Keaton’s Bar & Grill was Mr. Nathanson’s recording released under his own name by Six Degrees Records in March 2000. It is a story of a fire in a mythical bar and features performance by many of the collaborators he has worked with in his career, including Charles Earland, Ms. Harry, and Mr. Costello. It has been performed at Arts at St. Ann’s in New York City and at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
His sideman credits include four years recording and touring with The Lounge Lizards, work with Marc Ribot’s Rootless Cosmopolitans, Charles Earland and The Shirelles. He has also performed in special projects including a saxophone quartet concert in Brussels with Steve Lacy and Ned Rothenberg in which each of the four musicians contributed an original composition.
Contact Information
Management/Booking:
Management:
Dana Hall [email protected]
phone 201-906-2189
For booking:
United States:
Andreas Scherrer, Company of Heaven, NYC [email protected]
523-525 W 152 Street, Suite 51, New York, NY 10031
phone 212-281-9785
Europe:
Saudades Tourneen GmbH
Jakob Flarer, [email protected] Erhart, [email protected]
Rotholz 369a, 6220 Buch in Tirol, Austria
phone +43-5244-61151
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).