Sandhills Reunion is a multi-layered interweaving of words and music that Granelli calls an audio movie or play.

Jazz and the spoken word have been linked at least since the Beats. Jerry Granelli was an aspiring teenage drummer in San Francisco in the late 50s, when Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth and Patchen declaimed to the accompaniment of local players in clubs like the Cellar and the Blackhawk, and he got to improvise a bit with most of them. In the late 70s at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, where he founded the music department, Granelli often collaborated with Ginsberg, Burroughs and Anne Waldman in improvised concerts. His fascination with words led to the 1993 jazz instrumental CD A Song I Thought I Heard Buddy Sing, inspired by Michael Ondaatje's experimental novel about Buddy Bolden, Coming Through Slaughter. His new project Sandhills Reunion is a multi-layered interweaving of words and music that Granelli calls an audio movie or play.

The text, written and performed by actor/playwright/singer Rinde Eckert, is a glancingly linked sequence of reflections, imaginings, internal monologues and one historically accurate dialogue ('Twenty Questions for an Outlaw') using the persona of Billy the Kid as a thematic touchstone and the Sandhills region of northwestern Nebraska as the landscape of memory and desire. By turns rowdy, comic, ironic, nostalgic, angry and melancholy, it presents the unnamed speaker's psyche in the context of American reality and myth (complete text included in the printed booklet). The music, composed and played by a newly formed ensemble of trusted Granelli collaborators, counterpoints and boldly colours the words with its timbres and rhythms. It conjures up its own 'locations' within the band's collectively imagined synthesis of blues, jazz, rock, funk, the popular and the more esoteric music of the 20th century - from raunchy bars to uptown refinement, chamber music to the avant-garde.

Featuring François Houle, Jeff Reilly, David Mott, Christoph Both, Christian Kögel, J. Anthony Granelli. 24/88.2 recording mixed to stereo and 5.0.

Track Listing

• Like a Ghost in The Grass
• Our Particular Tragedy
• 20 Questions for an Outlaw
• Nolan
• River of Glass
• Your Voice
• Just Angels
• Last Light
• Little White Suit
• Never to See You
• Smart Women
• Spun Like A Spur

Additional Details

Label: Songlines

Genre: Jazz

Run Time: 48 mins

Release Date: 01/11/05

UPC: 774355155325