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Encore: Michael Gregory (Jackson)
ByBorn Michael Gregory Jackson in 1953 in New Haven, Connecticut, Gregory was around a variety of music from a young age, and his father "listened to a lot of music, from Groove Holmes and George Benson to Mahalia Jackson and Ray Charles, that type of stuff. The Creed Taylor jazz stuff, you know, and my father was a musician and played ukulele and tenor guitar, harmonica, but it wasn't his jobthat's how I started getting involved in music. I always heard music and my older brothers were singers [one was in The Five Satins]." Gregory originally wanted to play drums, though at the behest of his father, the quieter learning curve of the guitar won out.
By his teens, Gregory was playing local coffee shops and nightspots, primarily in a singer-songwriter vein, though he was listening to everything he could get his hands on: "I was into rock music, but I was into all kinds of music, especially Miles and at that time, electric Miles, Coltrane and Sanders, Webern and Stravinsky; radio wasn't so demographically programmed, and I always felt that I liked 'music,' and never separated it too much." After high school, Gregory moved to Boston with a friend ("originally, my plan was to actually go to Japan and become a monk; I was very involved in Zen Buddhism") playing folk music and improvising - not through any specific jazz connection, but through the thriving artistic community that existed in New York and Boston in the early '70s.

From there, Gregory became involved with other improvising luminaries like "Jay Hoggard, Dwight Andrews, Jeff Fuller, Pheeroan Ak Laff, and a whole bunch of people who were in that New Haven scene. I met Oliver Lake through a concert that I was playing with Leo in Boston, and Leo had invited Oliver, and Oliver invited me to come to New York and start playing with him. That was really it; through them I met the Art Ensemble, Anthony Braxton, [poet] Ntozake Shange, we started doing tours, and there was also a thriving scene in New York at the time. I also met and played a lot with Henry Threadgill, pretty much anybody you can think of, because it was a very fertile scene and everybody collaborated with dancers, poets, writers, photographers, and artists.
At the same time I was in the loft-jazz scene, I was also playing in the punk clubs, and I was always into a lot of different things." Gregory toured Europe and played the concert and festival circuit in a group with Lake, trumpeter Baikaida Carroll and Ak Laff, and recorded several highly unique albums from 1976 through 1979 for Bija, Black Saint, Improvising Artists and Arista. Gregory's music was unlike anything previous guitarists in either free or straight-ahead jazz idioms had done: "I really tried hard to not have the guitar sound like a guitar, or be limited by a traditional guitar style. Truthfully, I just wanted to produce what I heard in my imagination... I got involved with different concepts for amplification - using stereo amplification, finding ways to play longer tones on the guitar, whether that be bowing it with wooden things or using volume pedals. In fact, a recent Downbeat article had Bill Frisell saying that I was an inspiration to him using volume pedals in his work."

Arista, however, was less receptive to Gregory's talents as a rock musician, even more so because it was not an idiom that African-American artists were regularly associated with: "I had this situation where the label was saying 'oh wow, this is great, these are terrific songs,' and I was also very prolific and writing five songs a day, and I'd say 'okay, can I record them?' and they would just keep me on hold. Basically, I was black and they didn't want me to do rock, though doing R&B would have been fine. I spent a year with Arista trying to make the move I wanted to make musically, and they wouldn't let me do it, so finally I asked for my release."
This led to a time of serious disappointment with the record business, as though Gregory was working with producers like Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic (and even briefly Walter Becker), attempts to record the music he wanted and have it be promoted to any capacity were almost nil, though he was able to record one album for Island (1983's Situation X). In litigation for almost three years with Island to get out of his contract, Gregory became leery of the music business in general, and returned to Massachusetts to raise his family. However, in recent years, he has returned not only to playing regularly (including guitar solos with Stephen Allen setting the poems of Paul Muldoon, as well as two solo releases slated for Fall 2005) but to the world of free improvisation, and has renewed his relationship with Oliver Lake - a fruitful partnership that, to Gregory, "feels like home."
Through the pitfalls of the commercial music world, Michael Gregory has learned a lot about not only the integrity of the music business, but also about his own integrity as an artistsomething which has certainly not flagged a bit, and which can be credited to what improvisation has affirmed. "I had my own thing I was hearing, and I had it from when I was a kid. I would go to my lessons and they'd say 'here, play this' and I'd play my etudes, and right after I'd work on something of my own. I always heard my own music and would try to play what I was hearing... I love really being able to stretch myself. The integrity that comes from improvising - there is no substitute for it." This very integrity is what has imbued Michael Gregory's music, across all boundaries.
Recommended Listening:
* Oliver Lake - Holding Together (Black Saint, 1976)
* Michael Gregory Jackson - Clarity (Bija, 1976)
* Michael Gregory Jackson - Karmonic Suite (IAI, 1978)
* Oliver Lake - Life Dance of Is (Arista-Novus, 1978)
* Oliver Lake - Shine (Arista-Novus, 1978)
* Michael Gregory Jackson - Gifts (Arista-Novus, 1979)
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