Nearly 45 years ago, Jerry Granelli was featured on the album Your Mind Is on Vacation by jazz-blues great Mose Allison. This weekend the Halifax paragon of percussion brings the music of Allison and another mentor, pianist Vince Guaraldi, to your summer vacation with the Halifax Jazz Festival’s Virtual & Vibrant online concert series.
Streaming for free on Saturday night at 7 p.m. via the fest’s Facebook page and YouTube channel, the sets by Granelli’s trio — with longtime friend Jamie Gatti on bass and Creative Music Workshop cohort Tim Crofts on piano — and Halifax/Jamaican reggae singer Jah’Mila are the finale to a three-night series of shows.
On Thursday, jazz and blues singer Corey Adams shares the Sonic Temple studio space with Electro Jacques Therapy & Krasnogorsk, while Friday night’s lineup includes the Easley, Arsenault, Stevenson trio and spoken word artist Andre Fenton & guitarist Samantha Wilson.
Granelli’s set will be a special one, as he reconnects with some of the music that took him to some incredible places early in his career, captured on the new album The Jerry Granelli Trio Plays Vince Guaraldi & Mose Allison.
The drummer’s relationship with Guaraldi in the early 1960s is well-known, thanks to the popularity of their soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has since gone on to become a quadruple platinum-selling album, a rare status for a jazz recording matched only by the Miles Davis landmark Kind of Blue.
In recent years, Granelli has revisited the music made for the evergreen animated Peanuts Christmas special with annual concerts that raise money for music education, but the new release allows him to take a fresh look at Guaraldi classics like the hit Cast Your Fate to the Wind, which the pianist had to fight Fantasy Records to release as a single.
“He taught me a lot about being a professional jazz musician, and also about being honest and playing in a way that follows the music,” says Granelli, who calls Guaraldi a man of integrity who once threw a telephone across the room during one heated debate with his label.
“He protected his music, and he followed it to the largest selling jazz record in history, so they were really great years. And I think of them all as just slightly different parts of my life, that’s all.”
Granelli’s relationship with Allison began in the late ’60s, when he was playing at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop as a sideman for visiting artists. The drummer seized the opportunity to accompany Allison, “the Charles Ives of the Blues”, who would also earn fans in the rock world thanks to the Who’s thundering Live at Leeds cover of his Young Man Blues.
“I had always loved Mose’s music, and that’s when we had our one and only rehearsal,” he recalls. “We rehearsed for about a half-hour, and that’s it. We were musical friends and buddies from then on.
“We toured for about two years, it was the only time he had a regular trio, it was me and a bassist named Jack Hannah. But it was just sympatico. He told me the only thing he didn’t like was hi-hat on the two and the four, and that was cool with me because I hate it.”
“Some of the most wonderful years of my life”
Granelli stayed with Allison for a stretch in the mid-’70s, “some of the most wonderful years of my life.” He describes Allison as living “like a monk” on the road, limiting himself to a single glass of wine per day, which might explain why he lived to the ripe age of 89, passing away in 2016.
Allison’s cool approach to playing and his witty lyrics made him a standout artist on the club and festival scene, and one of a handful of artists who could bridge the gap between the blues and jazz, sharing stages with greats like John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Little Willie Dixon.
“All those guys had the ultimate respect for Mose as a blues artist. They knew his tunes, they knew the words, he recorded some of their tunes, and there were a lot of nights backstage with giant blues guys, just hanging out with him and us,” recalls Granelli.
“He was the real deal. He understood the blues, and his poetics influenced Bonnie Raitt, and Tom Waits, who opened for us a few times.”
As an artist who’s constantly moving forward, and always exploring, Granelli doesn’t consider this tribute to two of his mentors as a nostalgia trip or a look backward. For one thing, the songs haven’t traditionally been part of his repertoire in the intervening years, and the recording illustrates how this trio with pianist Jamie Saft and bassist Brad Jones disassembles them and reconstructs something new from the recognizable components.
“This isn’t even really revisiting that material, this is trying to find the essence of that material,” he explains. “Jamie was amazing, he just found the heart of it, completely, and he’s just as weird as Mose.
“But you can hear the tunes in there. There’s respect for this material, but there’s no trying to do it exactly like it was, or anything close to those arrangements. We didn’t even have arrangements, we just learned them in the studio and played them, that was it, and that’s the magic of it, I think.”
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