CATALOGUE   NEW RELEASES

This interview with Jerry Granelli and Rinde Eckert was conducted by email October-November 2004 by Tony Reif Tony Reif: Could you give us an account of how the project developed, the different stages it went though? And what as the initial inspiration for doing it? How did you decide on the band and on the pieces to be recorded? The record includes at least one piece by each member of the band and three collaborative works... Jerry Granelli: The band first came together in Halifax in 2001 at the Atlantic Jazz Festival. I'd played together before with everyone in different contexts, and each time I felt a strong connection, a certain ease of communication and also the feeling that every player had found that rare thing called "your own voice" on their instrument. Jeff Reilly and I had been talking about putting together a larger ensemble, so we went for it. We only had one or two pieces of written material, but the sound started to grow in my head. Another ingredient was that all of the players were not "stylized" jazz players, but had world and classical and new music roots. That night proved to be truly magic, and egoless, so I was convinced. The next year at the festival we did another concert called Impressions of Ondaatje; it was unique in that we did not really use Michael Ondaatje's texts, rather a shared feeling for the words. Again most of the playing was spontaneous... It worked. I'd wanted to do a CD using text and music... So we applied to The Canada Council for funding, and you and I talked and we started to organize for summer 2003. I knew that to get the sound I wanted we'd need Lee Townsend to produce the work. (Lee produced my 1993 theme record A Song I Thought I Heard Buddy Sing which was inspired by Ondaatje's novel about Buddy Bolden, Coming Through Slaughter, as well as the two UFB CDs.) He ageed to come on board, and we 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 and seeing what they would come up with. I didn't write a lot of music for this CD myself but was kind of the vision holder, maybe the director, always working with Lee. The next step was finding the text, and the voice. I've had a long relationship with writer-performer Rinde Eckert, and he agreed to do it. I'd originally planned to use various Ondaatje excerpts, but in the end Lee suggested that Rinde could create a new text for the project. We recorded the band, the music, at a separate session -- the musicians never heard any texts. Part of the reason for this was that I wanted the music to stand alone, not as a servant to the words but as a valid piece of musical work. The idea was that we would have two strong elements that come together to produce a third thing, a new form that I think of as an audio movie or play. So the listener might pay attention one time to the music and next time to the text, and once to the feeling of both. TR: Jerry, could you talk about the kinds of things you and Lee worked on to shape the relationship between the music and words? JG: I've done so many CDs where it's just capturing the live performance. The challenge of putting these pieces together, creating new compositions in the editing and mixing, was fascinating. How do Lee and I work? I basically created the musical forms, and we spent hours with entrances and exits of the words, moving things around and getting the levels right. Rinde's performance was perfect, and what he wrote when he heard the music changed things from where we'd started. Lee has the ability to notice every detail and not to settle for something until we knew it was working. And all of this would not have happened without the right engineer, Shawn Pierce, who did both the recording and the editing-mixing. We became another band of improvisers and composers. TR: You've worked with singers like Mose Allison and Jay Clayton and you've also been friends with a number of poets, especially I think during the early days of Naropa University in Boulder where you founded the music program in the mid-70s. The history of jazz and spoken word goes back at least to Kerouac and the Beats. You grew up in San Francisco in the 50s, were you already aware of that scene? JG: I guess it all started for me in the late 50s in S.F. around the Beat poets, hanging around clubs like the Blackhawk, The Coffee Gallery, hearing poets like Kenneth Patchen, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and getting to do a little improvising with themÉLater in the 60s doing some improvising with Lenny Bruce... But also I think listening to great standards, where you have great tunes with words -- Cole Porter, Gershwin... Also I've always loved country and western, where the words tell a story, you know those truck driver songs. Then in the 70s at Naropa, getting to do a lot of work with Ginsburg, Anne Waldman, Burroughs -- just doing concerts where we improvised together. TR: Rinde, could you talk a little about your own work and how this project relates to it? Also, what's the significance of the title Sandhills Reunion, and what were the connections that you were trying to make to the music in your writing? RE: I had just come back from a residency in Nebraska when I started to write. So