In the band photo on the tray card of Force Majeure, (Delmark Records, 2014) a CD by Paul Giallorenzo‘s GitGo band, the leader stands front and center wearing a t-shirt bearing the image of the Great Lakes. After 30 years in Chicago, does the Long Island native consider himself a Midwest musician?
Chicago jazz is played, he told me by phone last week, ”with a lot of energy and force and creating a certain momentum that rolls forward and draws in the listener and the fellow musicians. And I definitely was influenced by that.”
This Saturday, Giallorenzo (pronounced JEE-lorenzo) rolls into BOP STOP for a concert in the tenth anniversary season of New Ghosts, the intrepid presenting organization co-founded by Matt Laferty.
Laferty presented GitGo at Guide To Kulchur in November 2014, but that band, a septet, was difficult to take on the road. So this time, Giallorenzo appears in a trio setting with two other Chicagoans, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Mikel Patrick Avery, neither of whom is a stranger to our eastern end of the Great Lakes region.
The Windy City has been home to some influential piano trios led by Ahmad Jamal and Ransey Lewis, but this one sound has a sound all its own. “I sort of decided like, okay, I’m not gonna become the next Bill Evans or the next really tight, polished, amazing jazz pianist,” he said. “What I liked about Chicago was you could do your own thing and be creative and weird, and if it had a certain character or quality, it was cool.”
Giallorenzo’s piano style has character in abundance, and on the evidence of his trio’s latest recording, Play (Delmark Records, 2023) some of jazz piano’s most characterful players contributed.
Mal Waldron’s pared-down obsessiveness echoes in “Vamps and Feels,” the album’s opener, while “Saturday the 14th” is an answer song of sorts to Thelonious Monk’s “Friday the 13th.” Herbie Nichols’ oblique take on bebop is everywhere. “And Duke Ellington,” Giallorenzo added. “To me it’s Duke Ellington and then Monk, and then everything came from that.
On Play, these threads are woven together in a music that’s completely legible as jazz, while standing decisively apart from the music’s mainstream. That’s quite a feat, and it’s immeasurably aided by Roebke and Avery, each of whom approaches the music with a similar preference for favoring jazz’s colorful back roads over its crowded interstate highways.
That catholicity of taste is a hallmark of Chicago’s creative music community. So is the phenomenon of musicians who present the music as well as play it. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians pioneered the concept which has been carried on by Chicago such figures as saxophonist Dave Rempis, a regular on the New Ghosts series.
The pianist was a co-founder of the Elastic Arts Foundation, which operates a music venue and art space that has presented artists in many disciplines whose work would be unwelcome elsewhere. Giallorenzo recently founded Homeroom, a venue for interdisciplinary artists.
“it never made sense to me how anyone could play this music and not be some kind of either presenter or behind-the scenes-person,” Giallorenzo said. “Playing wise, a lot of musicians that I probably wouldn’t have known about. “You learn a lot and get that sort of mentorship or generational transfer of knowledge that’s just not that common.
“I studied music in school, but I didn’t go to music school. So I didn’t really have that sort of transfer,” Giallorenzo said. “Presenting was like going to school for me, and meeting people like Fred Anderson–he was one of those people who, everything he said to you is important and it stuck with you.”
Another thing that stuck with Giallorenzo was his gratitude for Laferty’s presentation of that 2014 GitGo concert. “I saw him most recently at a screening of a documentary film that I produced, and I was like, ‘Matt, what’s up?’ I asked him about this date we had booked for 2020 that obviously got cancelled and then, yeah, it took five years to get it going again.”
Paul Giallorenzo Trio with Mikel Patrick Avery and Jason Roebke, Saturday, April 26, 8 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave, Cleveland, Tickets $20, available here.
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
Red beans and ricely yours,
jc
