Bobby Sparks II

BIO

Born to a musical family in Corsicana, Texas in 1973, Sparks was playing organ in the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church at age six. “My mother was a gospel organist and pianist at church, so she was showing me all of the popular church hymns of the day,” he recalls. “And then my daddy was pushing the jazz thing. He was a trumpeter and a straight bebop man. Dizzy Gillespie was his favorite trumpet player but he also loved Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and Count Basie, so I grew up with all that music. Later on he turned me on to Miles Davis and would always play Kind of Blue for me. And he also turned me on to Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff, which is how I learned to play organ. Also, my daddy was a big Albert King, Albert Collins, B.B. King and Freddie King guy. So he got me into the blues too.”

After high school, Sparks studied music at Eastfield College in Mesquite near Dallas. It was during this period that he met and joined Kirk Franklin’s gospel group. From 1992 to 2005, he worked as Franklin’s musical director, touring and contributing to albums like 1993’s Kirk Franklin & the Holy Family, 1998’s Nu Nation Project, and 2002’s bona fide masterpiece The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin. An in-demand session player, Sparks has worked with gospel luminaries like Fred Hammond, CeCe Winans and Donnie McClurkin, as well as artists from the jazz and R&B world including Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Lalah Hathaway, Kirk Whalum, Les McCann, Natalie Cole and Nancy Wilson. He was a key member of trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s funk-jazz outfit RH Factor, appearing on 2003’s Hard Groove, 2004’s Strength, and 2006’s Distractions. Since 2016, Sparks has been a regular member of the acclaimed jam band Snarky Puppy, appearing on 2016’s Grammy-winning Culcha Vulcha and 2019’s Immigrance. His first album as a leader, 2019’s Schizophrenia: The Yang Project, featured contributions by Hargrove, Marcus Miller, Snarky Puppy’s Michael League, and many others.

The Hammond B-3 organ that Sparks received from his parents on his 16th birthday, and which he still plays to this day, is just one of the many keyboards in his current arsenal of instruments. He favors vintage gear, including the Mellotron 4000, Hohner D-6 clavinet, Fender Rhodes electric piano, Mini-Moog, Oberheim OBXA, ARP Odyssey and Prophet-5, all of which had their heyday in the 1970s. ‘I just love all of those keyboards from that era,” he says.

“They just have a different character.” Those vintage keyboards, which helped Sparks forge a distinctive voice as a highly sought-after sideman and studio player, came to the fore on Schizophrenia and now on Paranoia as well.