Jerry Granelli & Rinde Eckert

This interview with Jerry Granelli and Rinde Eckert was conducted by email during October-November 2004.

TR: 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…

JG: 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 them…Later 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 Sandhills Reunion was born out of this nexus of Ondaatje/Granelli and my Nebraska trip. Images of the Sandhills in northwestern Nebraska were still fresh, in particular the roundup and branding in which I’d taken part. I remembered my boyhood fascination with cowboys. But, of course, I was out of place. I suppose the appearance of Billy the Kid in that prairie heartland could be seen as a metaphor for my own youthful memories and my enduring sense of alienation and dislocation in this culture. Whatever the nature of the  psychological ground, this poetic conceit was fertile. I could imagine a rancher, in his proper place, at home with his wife, his responsibilities, his particular fate, dreaming of a kind of powerful other self, at home in the world, errant, romantic, or alien. This irony seems consistent with the music, with its urbane wit and its kind of formal simplicity and beauty. The rich borrowed imagery of the dream world then is overlaid on the more uniform and subtle tones of the grassland. The landscape, in short, becomes the perfect playground for the illustrious poetic soul of a simple and not so simple man. At last I was at the mercy of forces in motion, some that I put into play, some that were dictated by the land and the music, every element, in the end, as it should be, supporting every other element. It is both dreamer and landscape, an unsettled figure in a settled place, awake, watching his wife sleep and rise, or imagining himself hanging from some bridge on a taut rope, a heavy, ungainly creature, discovered where he doesn’t belong, suspended high above this river of glass.

TR: Jerry, the record was mixed to multi-channel as well as stereo, and the surround mix literally creates another dimension by being able to place the voice and instruments in depth. Beyond that, for you, does multi-channel add anything significant to the meaning or the experience?

JG: I think this record is perfect for the SACD system, because of the feeling of space in the music and the text. It’s a large landscape, also with incredible details that should provide such glorious richness, both sonically and from one’s mind’s eye.

TR: There are plans to tour Sandhills Reunion; how do you see the project developing from here in live performance?

JG: The piece was designed to expand very easily. The recording is a clear statement of the work, but the heart of it is still improvisation. So the feeling is that we all are waiting to get out on the road to start expanding it.