Jazz Articles about Jerry Granelli

Jerry Granelli V16: Vancouver '08

by Glenn Astarita
June 12, 2009

This 2009 and third release by drummer Jerry Granelli's dual-guitar band, features a DVD, Live At Ironworks, which documents the unit's Vancouver performance, used as a vehicle for working through the material on this album. Known for their loose developments and improvisational acumen, this studio set highlights the musicians' unhurried and textural approach to the grand schema.

Granelli is an accelerator and colorist. He paints the background via delicate cymbal swashes and rolling tom fills, while electric slide ...

Jerry Granelli: Groovemaster or Destroyer?

by Paul Olson
October 22, 2007

It's easy to mention drummer Jerry Granelli's accomplishments, but hard to really make clear his importance, or the way he's continuously, over forty years, been at the forefront of most of the innovations and new movements in jazz music. Granelli grew up in San Francisco and made his mark drumming for pianists Vince Guaraldi and Denny Zeitlin. Guaraldi's trio with Granelli and bassist Fred Marshall and Zeitlin's trio with Granelli and bassist Charlie Haden were top-tier, big-gig jazz ...

Jerry Granelli V16: The Sonic Temple

by John Kelman
May 21, 2007

Approaching seventy, Jerry Granelli's career has been defined by exploration and stylistic diversity. Forget that he's the drummer on pianist Vince Guaraldi's classic A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy, 1965). Consider, instead, his own discography, ranging from the pop deconstructions of his twin-guitar UFB group and the freer complexion of his duet records with clarinetist Jeff Reilly and keyboardist Jamie Saft, to the remarkable Sandhills Reunion, where spoken word and arrestingly cinematic musical form and freedom are compellingly combined.

The Sonic ...

Jerry Granelli/Words by Rinde Eckert: Sandhills Reunion

by Glenn Astarita
April 10, 2005

Various band members contribute compositional frameworks as a backdrop of sorts for Rinde Eckert's lyricism and recitations on this idyllically focused jazz work. And it's drummer Jerry Granelli's brainchild as he lays down the rhythms for a potpourri of acoustic-electric tunes structured upon medium-tempo rhythms and jazzy dreamscapes.

Eckert's likeable recitals are cleanly delivered amid a style that draws similarities to American cowboy jargon. Moreover, he converses with his alter ego on “20 Questions for an Outlaw, featuring ...

Jerry Granelli: Sandhills Reunion

by Dan McClenaghan
February 5, 2005

Like rocker Bruce Springsten with his Nebraska or author Annie Proulx with her two volumes of Wyoming stories, Jerry Granelli's Sandhill Reunion --where his band accompanies Rinde Eckert's words--evokes the American experience in the prairie heartland, placing poetic viginettes of small experience under a powerful microscope on a set of of jazz-backed prose poems that explore Billy the Kid, a bygone strip joint, a kiss blown at a wedding from the violinist to a small boy in a “Little White ...

Jerry Granelli/Words by Rinde Eckert: Sandhills Reunion

by John Kelman
February 2, 2005

In these days of rap-informed everything , the combination of spoken word and jazz is nothing new. Mike Ladd's Negrophilia - The Album (Thirsty Ear, '05), for example, seamlessly blends poetry with electronica-inflected free ideas. But rap has a certain cadence that differs from the less direct rhythms associated with the spoken word of, say, the beat poets of the '50s and '60s.

Drummer Jerry Granelli has been around long enough to remember those times and, in fact, collaborated in ...

Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Christmas

by Florence Wetzel
December 2, 2003

Just in time for the holidays, Fantasy has released a remaster of the classic soundtrack A Charlie Brown Christmas. The cartoon follows Charlie Brown's search for the true meaning of Christmas, and Vince Guaraldi's music is an integral part of this perennial holiday favorite. Guaraldi, born in 1928 in San Francisco and died in 1976 while resting between sets at a club, was part of the flourishing '50s California scene which produced the movement known as West Coast jazz. The ...