Gretchen Parlato: Quiet Revolutionary

Ian Patterson

Senior Contributor since 2006

Ian is dedicated to the promotion of jazz and all creative music all over the world, and to catching just a little piece of it for himself.

Recent articles (406 total)

Published: June 27, 2011

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AAJ: Graylen Epicenter is one of the best jazz recordings of the last twenty years, at least.

GP: Yeah, I'm glad to hear that, because I agree and I just hope that everyone is aware of it.

Gretchen Parlato—© Eva Elings

AAJ: How difficult was it to maintain that ostinato on "All of Time," when you and Binney repeat that riff for two minutes over that incredible drum duet between Brian Blade and Dan Weiss?

GP: It's not. It ends up being very meditative. I ended up approaching it in the same way I would a meditation. I do yoga every day and I think it's the same if you're an athlete and go running, or if you're a swimmer, you end up having this focus where you zone out, you actually zone in. You do something repetitive and it takes you to another place. David is a fan of that and you can hear that in a lot of his writing. You feel kind of high from it [laughs]; a very natural high. It's not necessarily easy; it's like holding a challenging yoga pose. When my role is just to repeat something I get in a zone and listen to what's going on around me and how my part is fitting with everything else. When I was at UCLA, one of my favorite classes was percussion ensemble from Ghana. It was similar where my part was just to repeat, everyone's part really, a drum part, a shaker part or a bell part; you just zone out and let the music take you. It's fun.

AAJ: Your performance on "Home" is wonderful, and that's an obvious standout track on Graylen Epicenter but the other one, "Same Stare, Different Thought" is very notable in a different way. Binney credits you for that actually being on the album.

GP: That's cool. I remember that moment. He was like: "I don't know, we might not need it." It was a very selfish moment because I was like: "You know what? I have spent so long learning this that we are going to do this." I was insistent [laughs] and I was actually proud of myself for doing that work. I probably made it seem like "Let's just try it," but in my head I was "Oh, no, no, no, we're doing this! I'm not going home without doing this track." I'm really glad we did it and it was actually a lot quicker to record than we thought, because it was extremely difficult and detailed.

AAJ: You did the right thing to insist because it's another moment of magic on the album. You mentioned your percussion class at ULCA and you play percussion on the Paulihno Da Viola track, "Alo Alo"; you seem to have a special affinity with Brazilian music.

GP: I do. I fell in love with João Gilberto, my first Brazilian love, [laughs] when I was 13, and I came across the Stan Getz, João Gilberto, [Antonio Carlos] Jobim classic bossa nova album. I was so taken with the sound and the concept. It was so intimate, so powerful and so deceptively simple. It spoke to me because I think it was really my personality. When I was younger I was kind of quiet. I had a lot underneath but I was a little shy. I liked singing but belting out songs never felt very natural to me and maybe hearing someone like João Gilberto, I was really moved because here was somebody who...it was okay to be a little fragile and intimate, and move and affect people. I've always tried to incorporate a little bit of that in what I do.

AAJ: Another recent collaboration is with singer Becca Stevens, who you mentioned earlier, on her album Weightless (Sunnyside, 2011). You also sing in a trio with her and Rebecca Martin, called Girls Gone Mild; could you tell us about these collaborations?

GP: Oh, sure. I had the wonderful opportunity of being introduced to Becca's music when I moved to New York and then getting to know her. Now we've become best friends. She's one of the closest people I have in my life. I'm just such a huge fan of her voice, her singing and her writing. I'm so grateful that she asked me to sing on her album. There's something very magical about blending with her. It's the same thing with Rebecca Martin. We were actually having a nice, relaxed, musical hang the three of us and we realized that it was a profoundly magical experience so we decided to collaborate. The name was originally Girls Gone Mild which was a comment that saxophonist Bill McHenry wrote under a photo of us hanging out in the backyard eating and drinking and there was a charm to that title but now the band's name is Tillery, which is named after a woman who was really influential to Becca.

These are two hugely inspiring and influential women to me, as humans, and also as singers and songwriters. We do this project when we can. We have some performances coming up and some teaching we're going to do at Stanford Jazz workshop and we kind of take it as it comes. It's a really unique and very special group. It's similar to how I talked about my own band; when you have this deep love for the people that you play with the music ends up reflecting that. We either write music specifically for the three of us or we might do each other's repertoire, or covers. We have an unexplainable, magical energy and we hope to share that with other people.

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