Solo Percussion Free Jazz at its Best: Jerry Granelli’s 1313

There is a lot to be said about the state of Jazz today, and most of that lot is far beyond my grasp as a music enthusiast. It is a sort of daunting lark for me to be able to review a Jazz record here, because Jazz is something that I’ve always found, frankly, a little daunting. There is something about Jazz that seems so much more legit than anything else going and people that are really into Jazz are just a whole other breed from most of the other music lovers I associate myself with. Sure, we all like to think we’re experts, we’ve mastered Indie-Rock, so conquering Jazz should be a breeze. And, fuck, we’ve all heard A Love Supreme, so that’s got to be, like, half-way there anyway, right?

Photo Courtesy of Divorce Records

Most of the records that get sent to Steel Bananas are from generic indie-rock bands and sensitive male singer-songwriters who are about as much fun to listen to as they are to write about. So, it was certainly a really interesting anomaly when we were sent a package from a Halifax-based record label called Divorce Records, brandishing a solo percussion Free Jazz album courtesy of a long-lost American Jazzman by the name of Jerry Granelli.

I admit it, I had never heard of the guy, but his press release assured me that he was a serious character in the Free Jazz scene and it isn’t tough to see that the man’s pedigree is impressive. Not many people can lay claim to a career that has spanned nearly fifty years, in which Granelli has played with many legendary Jazz players – most notably, Ornette Coleman – all over the world. He witnessed the birth of Free Jazz firsthand, and has been a sought-after session man for years.

1313 is Granelli’s first solo record, and it is unassailably cool, even for someone who has, admittedly, never heard a solo drum record before. The record is basically just Granelli wailing away at whatever percussion instruments happened to be immediately at his disposal at the time of 1313’s recording – the press release boasts that there are almost no overdubs anywhere on the album. However, despite the starkness of the record’s format, there is a sort of playful cohesion here that makes it extremely listenable.

Granelli’s passion for his craft is palpable. Rarely does the idea of a lone white dude erratically bouncing between instruments – all percussion, no less – evoke such a bizarre sense of joy. One immediately gets the feeling that Mr. Jerry is having the time of his life as he pounds recklessly at his drum kit. Granelli’s playing is just so simply emphatic and vigorous that, even when 1313 seems like little more than a chaotic wave of drum sounds, the listener is instantly carried away by the seventy-year old’s almost mischievous love of testing the sonic capacities of his instruments.

1313 flows together so well that its slim 34 minutes breeze by without a single seam in the production – it feels so amorphous that track titles are almost unnecessary here. It is a singular entity that weaves and wraps into and around itself without effort or thought. Much like this year’s electro-jazz space blob, Cosmogramma by Flying Lotus, it is less a collection of tracks than a sound collage that grows, percolates and bubbles independent of any conventional structure. The result is, again, less pretentious than it is playful. Granelli the Jazz Cheshire Cat appears and disappears unexpectedly throughout the record so that even when the record dissolves into silence, Jerry Granelli’s musical grin remains.