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CD |
| 6.332 Ft
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| 1. | Four Tom-Toms
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| 2. | Goodbye Porkpie Hat
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| 3. | Togi
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| 4. | Joyous March
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| 5. | Somewhere Else
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| 6. | I'm Nobody
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| 7. | Forgotten Song
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| 8. | Everything Machine
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| 9. | Chrystals
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Jazz
#06/81
Jay Clayton: vocals;
Jerry Granelli: drums, percussion
Compositions by Jerry Granelli/Jay Clayton, except Goodbye Porkpie Hat by Charles Mingus/Roland Kirk and I'm Nobody by Jay Clayton/Emily Dickenson
So much new music is cerebral, ironic and suspicious of emotion that it's exciting to hear two jazz-based experimentalists like Jay Clayton and Jerry Granelli who play with fearless empathy and abandon and who trust their intuitions and ideals enough to lay them out for everyone to hear.
Both Granelli and Clayton, he from San Francisco in the West, she from Ohio (by way of New York) in the East, have roots in 1960's free jazz. Back then, listeners often had to wade through a lot of swampy territory to get to solid, innovative ground. Today, two seasoned players like these can compose as they go and produce sparkling music of concise, classic proportions, enriched by a contemporary apprehension of Third World and classical innovations.
The music herein has a kind of stately, ceremonious quality, as if it were being played to a court for a kingdom that never was.
For such a minimal setting - voice and percussion - it is remarkably lush and sumptuous work, as well. Each musician here has a supreme command of timbre and an ability to get inside the sound of the other. Listening to them explore, expand and contract a musical idea, it's easy to forget that you're listening to just a singer and a drummer.
Granelli and Clayton first linked up in 1980 at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist school in Colorado that every summer sponsors an arts extravaganza from both coasts. It was the late percussionist Collin Walcott who brought them together.
"The first time three of us played togehter," says Jerry, "we did a totally free concert. It felt superb - so good that Jay and I started including each other in everything we did." Clayton, who is probably best known for her work with Vocal Summit, came up in New York with one foot in the club scene singing standards and the other foot in the free jazz loft scene. There, she developed a personal palette of ununsual scat sounds, surpassing the "scooby-doo" school of bebop and incorporating third world techniques and a freewheeling sense of form. She's been on albums with Richard Abrams (Spihumonesty), Pual McCandless (Navigator) and recorded the music of Steve Reich (Tehillim). Her own album with Jane Ira Bloom (All Out) is on Anima Records.
Granelli is a San Francisco native who played jazz on that city's bebop scene in the 1950's and 1960's. A part of San Francisco's rich underground free jazzscene, GranelliI also worked as a sideman with Jonn Hendricks, Vince Guaraldi, Hampton Hawes, John Handy and Ornette Coleman. He was a regular with Denny Zeitlin from 1964-67 and worked with Light Sound Dimension, a music-theater group, from 1965 - 70. He continues to work behind Mose Allison whenever the blues man tours the West Coast. Granelli has that rare combination of percussive heat and light that combines modern shading and technique with straightahead swing and responsiveness to flow of the moment. Since he came to the Cornish Institute in Seattle in 1981, he has continued to work with Clayton and touring with Ralph Towner and Gary Peacock.
Jay Clayton joined Granelli on the Cornish faculty in 1982. There, the duo crystallized as the nucleus of their work, into which they have drawn the energies of others: Julian Priester and Gary Peacock (sometimes billed as The Quartet), Jane Ira Bloom, Urzula Duziak (of Vocal Summit) and Nana Vasconcelos. Seattle and New York audiences have already gotten a taste of the various combinations that Jay Clayton and Jerry Granelli have formed. Now the rest of the world can listen in, too.
---Paul de Barros, Original Press Text written in 1986
Jay Clayton
Active Decades: '80s, '90s and '00s
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Modern Creative, Avant-Garde, Ballads, Standards, Avant-Garde Jazz
Jay Clayton is both a very significant singer in the jazz avant-garde and a highly influential educator. Clayton learned standards very early from hearing her mother sing around their house. She took private piano lessons from a young age and studied at the St. Louis Institute for Music for a short time. She graduated from Miami University in Oxford, OH in 1963 with a degree in Music Education. Although she studied classical music at school, Clayton sang jazz on the weekends at local clubs. After graduation she moved to New York. While at first she sang standards in clubs, she became one of the first jazz singers to start performing with freer and more avant-garde musicians, in addition to utilizing electronics and interacting with poets. An abbreviated list of her associates through the years includes saxophonists Mark Whitecage, Steve Lacy, Jane Ira Bloom, and Gary Bartz, clarinetist Perry Robinson, trombonist Julian Priester, pianists Muhal Richard Abrams, and George Cables, and the innovative a cappella group Vocal Summit, which teamed her with Jeanne Lee, Urszula Dudziak, Bobby McFerrin, and Norma Winstone.
As an educator, Clayton was inspired by Sheila Jordan and has become just as influential. She has taught at a countless number of seminars, workshops, and master classes, was on the jazz faculty of Cornish College of the Arts for 20 years, and has taught at Universitat fur Musik in Austria, the Bud Shank Jazz Workshop, City College, the New School in New York City, the Vermont Jazz Workshop and the Banff Center in Canada. As a singer, Clayton has been well documented through the years, recording for such labels as Anima, Hep, West Wind, ITM, Winter & Winter and Sound Winds. She has also recorded a duo set of standards with pianist Fred Hersch, Beautiful Love, for Sunnyside.
---Scott Yanow, All Music Guide |
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