Sandhills Reunion

Artists Jerry Granelli

€29,99 EUR

Tax included.

Sandhills Reunion is an audio play, “a coming together of the spoken word and music.” Members of Jerry Granelli’s V16, joined by cello and woodwinds including clarinetist François Houle, perform in counterpoint to Rinde Eckert’s poetic narratives, partly inspired by the 19^th-century outlaw Billy the Kid. Vivid sonics place the listener in a mythical American landscape, where echoes of the Old West resonate with contemporary traumas and realities. - Mark Werlin, AllAboutJazz and NativeDSD reviewer

Jazz and the spoken word have been linked at least since the Beats. Jerry Granelli was an aspiring teenage drummer in San Francisco in the late 1950s, when Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth and Patchen declaimed to the accompaniment of local players in clubs like the Cellar and the Blackhawk, and he got to improvise a bit with most of them. In the late 70s at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, where he founded the music department, Granelli often collaborated with Ginsberg, Burroughs and Anne Waldman in improvised concerts. His fascination with words led to the 1993 Jazz Instrumental album A Song I Thought I Heard Buddy Sing, inspired by Michael Ondaatje’s experimental novel about Buddy Bolden, Coming Through Slaughter. Sandhills Reunion is a multi-layered interweaving of words and music that Granelli called an audio movie or play. The text, written and performed by actor/playwright/singer Rinde Eckert, is a glancingly linked sequence of reflections, imaginings, internal monologues and one historically accurate dialogue (“Twenty Questions for an Outlaw”) using the persona of Billy the Kid as a thematic touchstone and the Sandhills region of northwestern Nebraska as the landscape of memory and desire. By turns rowdy, comic, ironic, nostalgic, angry and melancholy, it presents the unnamed speaker’s inner life in the context of American reality and myth (complete text included in the booklet). The music, composed and played by an ensemble of trusted Granelli collaborators, counterpoints and boldly colours the words with its timbres and rhythms. It conjures up its own “locations” within the band’s collectively imagined synthesis of blues, jazz, rock, funk, ambient, folk, country, the popular and the more esoteric music of the 20th century – from raunchy bars to uptown refinement, chamber music to the avant-garde. Granelli explained the process of creation: “[Producer Lee Townsend and I] discussed the overall concept, basically recording it like shooting a film — just gathering material, then putting it all together in the mix. I asked the members of the band to write — not specifying what to write, but implying what I was hearing. I didn’t write a lot of music myself but was kind of the vision holder, maybe the director. The next step was finding the text, the voice. I’ve had a long relationship with Rinde. I’d originally planned to use Michael Ondaatje excerpts, but in the end Lee suggested that Rinde could create a new text. The musicians never heard any texts. Part of the reason for this is that I wanted the music to stand alone, not as a servant to the words. The idea was that we would have two strong elements that come together to produce a third thing, a new form. So the listener might pay attention one time to the music and next time to the text, and once to the feeling of both” Jerry Granelli, drums, samples Rinde Eckert, voice, text François Houle, clarinet Jeff Reilly, bass clarinet David Mott, baritone sax Christoph Both, cello Christian Kögel, electric & acoustic guitars J. Anthony Granelli, bass, lap steel guitar

Tracklist

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Total time: 48:10

1. Like a Ghost in the Glass