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Art Ensemble of Chicago, William Tatge & Hans Ludemann
This episode evokes special memories of my first exposure to the Art Ensemble of Chicago many years ago. I was left in awe at the spectacle, let alone the originality and power of the music. We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration, the new release from Pi Recordings brings that concert and much more music by the AEoC to mind. What an amazing and important group they were and still are, thanks to Roscoe Mitchell and Famoudou Don ...
read moreJerry Granelli: What I Hear Now
The simple answer to the question that drummer Jerry Granelli poses on What I Hear Now is “horns." He hears horns over the foundation of his regular trio with saxophonist Dani Oore and bassist Simon Fisk who uses the 3 string bassetto here. The mix is three reeds, including tenor saxophonist Mike Murley, joined by a trombone. Granelli is not an easy guy to put into a compartment. He was part of pianist Vince Guaraldi's trio during the ...
read moreJerry Granelli: What I Hear Now
This is what master drummer Jerry Granelli hears now: a wide variety of left-of-center music that circumvents strict harmonic corralling, thanks to the absence of guitar or piano, and makes good use of multiple horns. Of course, if you catch Granelli a few months down the road, he might hear something completely different. Over the past half a century, Jerry Granelli has been making his mark by being his own man. Who else but a staunch individualist ...
read moreJerry Granelli V16: Vancouver '08
Over 40-plus years as an innovative performer and renowned educator, drummer Jerry Granelli has shown an affinity for the sonic possibilities of paired electric guitars. Since 2003, he's explored this interest in V16, with guitarists David Tronzo and Christian Kogel and his son, electric bassist J. Anthony Granelli. Vancouver '08, their third release, vividly captures their unique sound world--referencing jazz, blues and psychedelic rock, but not beholden to these traditions. The group has forged a collective identity ...
read moreJerry Granelli V16: Vancouver '08
Jerry Granelli's drums open and close the third release from his V16 outfit, Vancouver '08. In between he mostly sits back and gives ground to electric strings: two guitars and a bass. It's a wise choice. Guitarists Christian Kogel and especially David Tronzo are wizards of the six string. The Live at Ironworks DVD that accompanies this CD provides visual evidence of their tricks. Slide guitarist Tronzo applies not only the traditional steel and glass to his axe, but also ...
read moreJerry Granelli V16: Vancouver '08
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 ...
read moreJerry Granelli: Groovemaster or Destroyer?
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 groups, ...
read moreJerry Granelli V16: The Sonic Temple
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 ...
read moreJerry Granelli/Words by Rinde Eckert: Sandhills Reunion
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 ...
read moreJerry Granelli: Sandhills Reunion
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 ...
read moreJerry Granelli/Words by Rinde Eckert: Sandhills Reunion
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 ...
read moreJerry Granelli: The V16 Project
Judging by its grille and supercharged front end, Jerry Granelli's new thing is built to cruise. The V16 Project, a power quartet nominally under the drummer's leadership, has the potential to go any which direction. That it does, in its own peculiar way, restlessly shifting among styles and mixing them up to the point where you can't tell them apart (and to tell the truth, it doesn't matter anyway). Jazz purists, or purists of any kind, you better skip this ...
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