Larry Grenadier
As one of the most accomplished bassists working in jazz today, Larry Grenadier has been praised as “a deeply intuitive” musician by The New York Times and as an instrumentalist with a “fluid sense of melody” by Bass Player magazine. He has built an expansive body of work that encompasses a variety of projects with many inventive and influential musicians.
Grenadier’s bass work has been extensively featured in the bands of pianist Brad Mehldau and guitarist Pat Metheny, and has graced albums by a broad array of artists, including Paul Motian, Charles Lloyd, Enrico Rava, Danilo Perez, Chris Potter, Joshua Redman and Kurt Rosenwinkel. He’s also found time to make three albums with the trio ‘Fly[...]
As one of the most accomplished bassists working in jazz today, Larry Grenadier has been praised as “a deeply intuitive” musician by The New York Times and as an instrumentalist with a “fluid sense of melody” by Bass Player magazine. He has built an expansive body of work that encompasses a variety of projects with many inventive and influential musicians.
Grenadier’s bass work has been extensively featured in the bands of pianist Brad Mehldau and guitarist Pat Metheny, and has graced albums by a broad array of artists, including Paul Motian, Charles Lloyd, Enrico Rava, Danilo Perez, Chris Potter, Joshua Redman and Kurt Rosenwinkel. He’s also found time to make three albums with the trio ‘Fly’.
After graduating from Stanford in 1989, Grenadier moved to Boston to work with vibraphonist Gary Burton, touring around the world as a member of Burton’s band. By 1991, he had settled in New York, where he quickly established himself in that city’s jazz community, working with a distinguished assortment of musicians as well as renewing his working relationship with Joe Henderson and serving a stint in Betty Carter’s band.
Although he met them years before, Grenadier became especially close with Jeff Ballard and saxophonist Mark Turner during his early days in New York; the three players came together as the cooperative trio Fly in 2000, releasing their eponymous debut disc in 2004. The trio has followed that with two albums for ECM: Sky & Country (2009) and Year of the Snake (2012), with each further underscoring the group’s unique sound and uncanny chemistry. “Playing with a group of musicians over a period of years, you develop a sense of trust – and with that trust comes a willingness to take risks and try different things,” Grenadier says. “In Fly, we all write material. And while Mark carries the melody a lot of the time, often it’s me or Jeff leading the sound. It’s a democratic band.” The New York Times has called Fly “one of the most compellingly cohesive small groups in jazz,” while sax great Joe Lovano is on record as a fan: “Fly is a beautiful trio – they play with a wonderful clarity,” he said. “They’re improvising, but their dialogue is more classical in nature, the way it feels. That’s [the kind of] expression – waves, life forms, the wind. Fly sounds lovely, and their music has a real presence – it captures you.”
In February 2019, ECM Records released Grenadier’s first album of solo bass. Titled The Gleaners, it presents a brace of originals by the bassist alongside pieces by George Gershwin, John Coltrane and Paul Motian, as well as a pair of works written especially for Grenadier by guitarist, longtime friend and fellow ECM artist Wolfgang Muthspiel. Grenadier also includes an instrumental interpretation of a song by his wife, and frequent collaborator, the singer-songwriter Rebecca Martin.
Grenadier recorded The Gleaners in December 2016 at Avatar Studios in New York City for ECM with Manfred Eicher as producer and James Farber as engineer. Grenadier and Eicher mixed the album at Studios La Buissonne in France. In his liner note, Grenadier writes: “The process for making this record began with a look inward, an excavation into the core elements of who I am as a bass player. It was a search for a centre of sound and timbre, for the threads of harmony and rhythm that formulate the crux of a musical identity.” Reflecting on the gestation of this first solo album, he talks further: “For years, I had been satisfied by collaborating with other artists, feeling that I had room for my own voice in the music. But Manfred planted the seed of making a solo album, and I cultivated it as an artistic challenge.
Grenadier’s title of The Gleaners was inspired by a documentary film from 2000, The Gleaners and I, by French director Agnès Varda, who was in turn influenced by the 19th -century painting by Millet called The Gleaners , of women harvesting in a field. “For me, as a musician, you glean things from the people you play with and the music you listen to, but it takes work to get the most out of everything, to harvest the things you can use yourself,” Grenadier says. “I’ve always felt something like that as an artistic credo – working to get to the good stuff. Even in the middle of a gig with, say, Brad – to be authentic in each moment, alive to the best of what’s happening.”
The art of music “remains a learning experience for me, above all,” Grenadier concludes. “I’m always working on the technical aspects of my playing, but at the same time, I know that what happens onstage between musicians isn’t all about that. The level of ‘telepathic’ intuition that exists in music, especially in jazz, is a constant reminder to me of what humans are capable of, both in music and beyond. I always want to keep a bit of that mystery at play in the music, so as not to over-intellectualize the magic. That’s why I think you have to balance a studied approach to how music works with a primal, instinctual understanding of the way music feels. Having access to technique is essential for being able to communicate and express yourself musically. But, ultimately, music is about emotion. The most vital quality in making music at a heightened level is empathy, the ability to listen and to feel.”
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