Music career The younger Pettinato became involved in the
Argentine rock scene of the late 1970s mostly as a journalist with the
El Expreso Imaginario monthly magazine, which he directed from 1980 until its demise in 1982. In parallel, he was the on-and-off saxophonist for the 1980s band
Sumo, led by Anglo-Italian
Luca Prodan. He has released a
free jazz album named
Free Jazz Musica Anticomercial, as Robert Pettinato & Now Free Jazz.
Television career After Prodan's death and the band's dissolution, he started working in
television together with
Gerardo Sofovich, co-hosting
La noche del Domingo in the early 1990s. Later on, he gained popularity by hosting
Duro de acostar on
Telefe, a midnight talk show modeled after
David Letterman's. In the mid-1990s, he attained cult status by co-hosting post-midnight sports and showbiz show
Orsai (a deformation of the
football term
off-side) with Gonzalo Bonadeo on one of Argentina's many sports cable channels. As an actor, he took part in
Primicias, a television series produced by
Pol-Ka and broadcast by
Canal 13. He also hosted TV programs
Mira quien canta,
Todos al diván,
Petti en vivo (
Canal 9),
Un aplauso para el asador (Canal 13), and the ironic
Indomables (
América TV) and Duro de Domar. In March, of 2009 he began
Un Mundo Perfecto, a
late-night talk show on (
América TV). Following the unexpected ending of
Indomables due to a conflict between the production company PPT and América TV, the production renamed and moved the program to Canal 13, where Pettinato (as of October 2006) hosts
Duro de Domar. He has hosted since 2004 an FM radio morning show called
El Show de la Noticia. He was absent from the program for over one week after a fire in his son's (Felipe Pettinato) apartment where Melchor Rodrigo, a neurologist, had died. ==Sexual misconduct accusations==