Perry Wortman

Perry Wortman is a bassist who spent fifteen years in Brooklyn playing music that didn't fit neatly into a genre: South Indian Carnatic classical repertoire, jazz trios, old American folk songs, chamber writing, indie rock. He has mostly worked as a sideman, and he's good at the part of the job that doesn't get written about, which is making a band sound like a band.

He grew up in Tulsa and moved to New York to study with Buster Williams at the New School, then finished his degree at the Manhattan School of Music with Jay Anderson. His first record came out of those years. The Paislies was recorded in Brooklyn in 2005 and released by Fresh Sound New Talent, the Barcelona label that gave Robert Glasper, Kris Davis and Ambrose Akinmusire their early records. The band was nominally led by drummer Paul Wiltgen and guitarist Jesse Lewis, but it ran as a composers' collective. The music sat between jazz and progressive rock. They toured Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Perry was the founding bassist of the Arun Ramamurthy Trio, with drummer Sameer Gupta. The group took centuries-old Carnatic pieces and played them as a jazz trio, without treating the source material as decoration. Their 2014 debut, Jazz Carnatica, featuring pianist Marc Cary, was picked as a Top New Release by NPR's New Sounds and a best release of the year by All About Jazz. The trio played Symphony Space, the Kennedy Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Ragas Live Festival at Pioneer Works, and had a regular run at the Cornelia Street Café, where a lot of that scene lived before the club closed. In 2019 the group received a New Jazz Works commission from Chamber Music America. Ramamurthy later thanked Wortman in the liner notes of the resulting record for starting the journey with him and shaping the trio's sound.

Around the same time he joined Karavika, the chamber group led by violinist Trina Basu and cellist Amali Premawardhana, with the tabla chair rotating among Sameer Gupta, Advait "Avi" Shah and Dan Weiss. They made two records, Sunrise (2012) and Of Earth and Sky (2016), the second of which was another All About Jazz best-of-the-year pick. The material ranged from Tagore settings and Sri Lankan folk melodies to "All the Pretty Little Horses" and "Oh, Watch the Stars." Wortman played bass and, on a few tracks, mandolin. The New York Times called the group a soulful blend of classical and folk traditions from the United States and India. Both bands came out of the Brooklyn Raga Massive.

The rest of the work has been all over the place, on purpose. Two Spanish tours with the Ryan Blotnick Group, the first ending in the studio for Music Needs You (Songlines, 2008), with Everything Forgets following the next year. And nearly a decade with the indie rock band Hungry Hands. They played Rockwood Music Hall Stage 1 and 2, Pianos and most of the small rooms in Brooklyn. The band released Plumb Restless in 2013 and Clear Lens in 2019, led by the single "Zombies."

Since 2022 he has lived outside Chicago, where he continues to write, record and play.

Awards

New Jazz Works grant from Chamber Music America, 2019 (ART)

Dan McClenaghan's Best Releases Of 2016 (Karavika)

Top New Release from NPR’s New Sounds 2015 (ART)

Dan McClenaghan's Best Releases Of 2014 (ART)