Bio:
Began playing bass at 12
Surfing career interrupted due to too much practicing
Began playing upright after hearing Chick Corea’s LIGHT AS A FEATHER.
Began playing fretless at 14 after running over fretted bass with Toyota.
Heard Jaco and Stanley and began practicing 12 hours per day.
THEN……
Got full scholarship to North Texas State Univ. Played lots of Upright.
Got full scholarship to Univ. of Miami. Played lots of electric. Lots of gigs(see below).
Surfed a lot.
THEN….
Joined Paquito D’Rivera’s band and moved to NY. Saw the world. Did not Surf Then.
Joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band in 1983. Saw more of the world and surfed a bit. And Played Lots of gigs. (see below)
THEN…
Moved to Los Angeles In 1985. Surfed too Much and Played LOTS AND LOTS of gigs. (see below)
Formed BASS EXTREMES with Victor Wooten in 1993
BELOW…
Recorded and/or toured with…
Beboppers such as Dizzy, James Moody, Lew Tabackin, Dave Leibman……etc
Latin Jazzers such as Paquito. Claudio Roditti, Michel Camilo…… etc
Smooth Jazzers such as the Rippingtons, David Benoit, Kilauea…..etc
Rockers such as Jethro Tull, Skynyrd, Jon Anderson (YES)…etc
Country guys such as Willie Nelson, Ray Price, Billy Joe Shaver….etc
Fusioners such as Larry Carlton, Emily Remler, Brandon Fields….etc
New agers such as Kitaro, Max Highstein, T Lavitz…..etc
Bluesers such as Tab Benoit, Johnny Witherspoon, Toni Price….etc
Jazz singers such as Mel Torme, Ernestine Anderson, Mark Murphy…etc
Fellow Bassists such as Victor Wooten, John Patitucci, Billy Sheehan…etc
Stuff I am Proud of….
BASS PLAYER OF THE YEAR runner-up 1994 and 1996….2 solo cd’s DICHOTOMY and EVOLUTION……new Bass Extremes cd JUST ADD WATER…..I can play a 13th chord in tune on a 6 string fretless bass..Won the last two surfing contests and Tennis tournaments that I entered…. I choose to live in Myrtle Beach SC!
Other stuff….
Faculty at Bass Institute of Technology 10 years…Artist In-Residence @ Coastal Carolina University….Advisory board and columnist for Bass Player Mag…Faculty for NGSW… Solo Bassist and clinician worlwide…Books include Steve Bailey Bass Series, …cont.. Bass Extremes :the book.. Videos include Advanced Bassix, Fretless Bass, The Day Bass Players Took over the World, and BASS EXTREMES.
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).