Past and future necessarily collide in the work of any jazz
musician. On his second album 1954, São Paulo-born, New York-based
guitarist/composer Ricardo Grilli takes stock of his own history - both
personal and musical - while also imagining how the modern day and its art
would look from the perspective of the past. To realize that time-traveling
vision he's enlisted an all-star band of deeply-rooted yet forward-thinking
contemporaries: pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Eric
Harland.
The title of 1954 (due out October 7 via Tone Rogue Records)
comes from the year in which Grilli's father was born - one possible beginning
point for his own story. It also falls at the dawning of the Space Age, a time
when people were looking optimistically forward to a future full of innovation
and exploration. Significantly for the music contained within, it was also a
time when jazz - bebop in particular - was thriving in Grilli's adopted home of
New York City, ghosts of which he can't help but encounter as he walks through
the city today.
"It gets a little mystical as you imagine it in your
head how things were back then," Grilli says. "I wonder if those
musicians ever thought that the music they were shaping would evolve to become
the way it is now. The concepts we use in today's jazz still very much use the
format of the bebop and hard bop era, even though they have more modern
harmonies and meters."
No matter how much he engages in a dialogue with the past,
Grilli's music is decidedly of the moment, replete with sleek, captivating
melodies over tense, balance-challenging rhythms, combined in intricate but
emotionally engaging structures. His compositions reveal the influence of
modern masters like Kurt Rosenwinkel and Mark Turner alongside adventurous pop
experimentalists like Radiohead and Sigur Ros, with a relaxed but expressive
melodicism imbued by a youth spent absorbing the tropical sounds of Jobim and
Elis Regina.
Grilli's 2013 debut, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler,
captured the guitarist in a transitional moment. It documented not only his
move from Brazil to Boston and then New York, but also his emergence onto the
jazz scene after graduating from Berklee College of Music. Having picked up the
guitar for the first time at the relatively advanced age of 20 and starting
school at 23, five years later than most of his classmates, he recorded the
album feeling like an underdog facing an uphill struggle.
That notion is left behind on 1954, which finds a more
mature, self-assured Grilli in sophisticated communication with some of modern
jazz's most renowned musicians. "For the longest time I felt like I had
missed the start of the race and had to catch up to the competition," he
says. "However, I have been very lucky to be able to play with so many of
my heroes, and this record is, hopefully, a statement of my acceptance of my
own playing and thinking myself worthy of playing with the musicians on it."
Long fascinated with
astronomy and the cosmos (Stephen Hawking sits on his bookshelf beside the
likes of Italo Calvino, the surrealist author who lent both If On a Winter's
Night a Traveler and the current album's "Vertigo" their titles),
Grilli weaves interstellar concepts throughout the tunes on 1954. Opening track
"Arcturus" is named for the brightest star in the eastern celestial
hemisphere, its gradual build in intensity (thanks to Harland's subtly
insistent rhythms) suggesting the massive star's gravitational pull.
"Cosmonauts," meanwhile, was inspired by the story of "phantom
cosmonauts," an unconfirmed theory suggesting that Yuri Gagarin's
successful flight may have been preceded by other ill-fated attempts.
"It's a terrifying story," Grilli says. "I
imagined the fear of going into the unknown and not coming back. Jazz has a bit
of that feeling, but not in the deadly sense. So I wanted to write an eerie,
sad song, something a little somber, dark and mysterious."
That combination of the cosmic and the intimate is echoed
throughout 1954. Especially poignant is the lovely, ethereal "Rings,"
which suggests the celestial rings surrounding Saturn and other planets as well
as being a musical analog for the rings that symbolize union between people.
The simmering, atmospheric "Radiance," partially inspired by Brian
Blade's soulful Fellowship Band, evokes the far-off glow of heavenly bodies
while pondering the loss of loved ones. "Breathe," essentially a cha
cha cha with modern contours, provides a respite from the frantic
"Arcturus," replicating the moment that a shuddering spacecraft
breaks through the atmosphere into weightlessness.
Grilli also pays homage to some of his peers and mentors on
1954. "Pogo56" was written for trumpeter and Berklee professor Jason
Palmer, while "Far Away Shores" is an homage to pianist Julian Shore,
a close friend and collaborator. The album closes with "Pulse," a
final word on the idea of looking backward to look forward: a modernist bop
tune that swings hard over contemporary harmonic movement.
Grilli's scintillating quartet combines four artists who are
bandleaders in their own rights and who all approach the creative process in
similar, equally enthralling fashion. "When I write a song," Grilli
explains, "I'm trying to write a soundtrack to a different world. I hope
when people listen to it they get taken to a different place, and these guys
are all amazing at that. You can give them any piece of music and they'll
create new worlds and stories out of it."
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