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Pasquale Grasso
The Integrated Global Creative Economy
I CURATE
Network Node
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Name:
Pasquale Grasso
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City/Place:
New York City
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Country:
United States
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Hometown:
Ariano Irpino
CURATION
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from this node by:
Matrix+
Life & Work
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Bio:
It was the kind of endorsement most rising guitarists can only dream of, and then some. In his interview for Vintage Guitar magazine’s February 2016 cover story, Pat Metheny was asked to name some younger musicians who’d impressed him. “The best guitar player I’ve heard in maybe my entire life is floating around now, Pasquale Grasso,” said the jazz-guitar icon and NEA Jazz Master. “This guy is doing something so amazingly musical and so difficult.
“Mostly what I hear now are guitar players who sound a little bit like me mixed with a little bit of [John Scofield] and a little bit of [Bill Frisell],” he continued. “What’s interesting about Pasquale is that he doesn’t sound anything like that at all. In a way, it is a little bit of a throwback, because his model—which is an incredible model to have—is Bud Powell. He has somehow captured the essence of that language from piano onto guitar in a way that almost nobody has ever addressed. He’s the most significant new guy I’ve heard in many, many years.”
As he’s done with many rising jazz stars, Metheny later invited Grasso over to his New York pad to jam and share some wisdom. He’s since become a generous presence in Grasso’s life, and his assessment of Grasso’s playing is—no surprise—spot-on. Born in Italy and now based in New York City, the 30-year- old guitarist has developed an astounding technique and concept informed not by jazz guitarists so much as by bebop pioneers like Powell, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and the classical-guitar tradition. His new digital-only EP series, available beginning in June from Sony Masterworks, showcases Grasso in the solo-guitar format, where his intensive studies of both midcentury jazz and classical meld into a signature mastery that is, remarkably, at once unprecedented and evocative.
But whom does it evoke? After a surface listen, Joe Pass and his essential Virtuoso LPs might come to mind. Now listen again. The sparkling, immaculately balanced tone; the tasteful tinges of stride and boogie-woogie rhythm; the stunning single-note lines that connect his equally striking use of chordal harmony—for Grasso, great solo arranging equals Art Tatum.
Many serious guitar heads have been hip to Grasso for a while now and are aware of his jaw-dropping online performance videos, his beautiful custom instrument -- built in France by Trenier Guitars -- and his early career triumphs. In 2015, he won the Wes Montgomery International Jazz Guitar Competition in New York City, taking home a $5,000 prize and performing with guitar legend Pat Martino’s organ trio. Last year at D.C.’s Kennedy Center, as part of the NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert, Grasso participated in a special performance to honor Pat Metheny, alongside his guitar-wunderkind peers Dan Wilson, Camila Meza, Gilad Hekselman and Nir Felder.
These days, Grasso teaches and maintains a packed gig schedule around New York, including frequent solo performances at the popular Greenwich Village haunt Mezzrow, where a regular Monday-night gig allowed him to develop his solo-arranging skillset. Not that Grasso thinks his work is done. “All [of the musicians I love are] inspiration for me to get new ideas and form my style, because it’s still growing,” Pasquale says. “And it’s gonna be growing until the day I die.”
How Grasso came to be such a tremendous talent is also, in many ways, the story of his older brother, Luigi Grasso, a gifted alto saxophonist who tours globally as a bandleader and collaborator. The brothers were born and raised in Ariano Irpino, a bucolic hillside town in Italy’s Campania region. Their parents, while not being musicians themselves, were nonetheless passionate music lovers who filled the family home with jazz and classical sounds and took their sons along to events like Umbria Jazz. “Instead of watching TV at night,” Grasso recalls, “my dad would put on a Chet Baker record and we’d listen.”
Both boys started in music young. Luigi, suffering from asthma, began playing sax on the advice of a doctor who believed it would help the 6-year-old with his breathing. Pasquale decided not much later that he needed to play an instrument too, and when he browsed a local shop, the guitar caught his interest immediately. Dad happily bought the instrument, but not before striking a deal with his son: “If I buy this for you, you have to promise me that you’ll practice.” In the ensuing years Pasquale kept up his end of the bargain, as did his brother, hour after hour, every day. Grasso’s mother later bought a book on how to read music, teaching her sons the skill as she absorbed it herself.
Grasso found his first important mentor in Agostino Di Giorgio, a New York-raised guitarist who’d moved to Italy as an adult, to take care of his aging grandparents. Di Giorgio, a spirited, hilarious character and a brilliant musician, was a star pupil to Chuck Wayne, the deeply influential guitarist and educator recognized for his work with Woody Herman, George Shearing and Tony Bennett, among many others. Di Giorgio helped Wayne to codify his distinctive concepts of chords and scales in two highly sought-after books and passed Wayne’s methods along to Grasso. In the summer of 1998, the brothers attended a jazz workshop with bebop-piano royal Barry Harris in Switzerland. Harris showed both boys great kindness, and a relationship was quickly formed. Eventually, the Grasso brothers went from students at Harris’ global lineup of workshops to being two of his right-hand instructors and assistants. To this day, if Pasquale doesn’t have a gig on Tuesday night, he’ll drop in on Harris’ marathon teaching sessions in Manhattan to learn something new.
Harris’ guidance helped to firm up Grasso’s tastes and perspective in jazz, as did a couple of invaluable recordings his father introduced to him: One Night in Birdland, a live Charlie Parker Quintet compilation featuring Bud Powell and Fats Navarro; and Art Tatum’s Solo Masterpieces box set. Regarding the latter, Grasso remembers, “I couldn’t believe it. I would just play that all day, and I couldn’t understand anything he was doing. It seemed like there were two pianos.” Grass felt a near-identical revelation later, after taking in a concert by the renowned classical guitarist David Russell. “I was shocked by his technique,” he says, “because it sounded like two jazz guitars together. I told my dad, ‘Maybe I should study classical, because I think that would help the way I want to play jazz.’” Grasso began in 2008 to fuse his hard- earned jazz technique with classical revisions and refinements at the Conservatory of Bologna, under the tutelage of guitarist Walter Zanetti.
In 2012, the same year that Pasquale toured extensively as a Jazz Ambassador on behalf of the U.S. Embassy, the guitarist relocated to New York. He hit the scene running, soon enough becoming part of working bands led by Ari Roland and Chris Byars, and settling into a regular gig with the late, great saxophonist Charles Davis. Grasso has also performed with Freddie Redd, Frank Wess, Leroy Williams, Ray Drummond, Steve Grossman, Tardo Hammer, Jimmy Wormworth, John Mosca, Sacha Perry, Bucky Pizzarelli, China Moses, Harry Allen, Grant Stewart and Joe Cohn.
On his initial Sony Masterworks recordings, Pasquale explores standards, ballads, and the repertoire of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, showcasing his sweeping abilities in the most intimate possible setting. Here you can experience his lifetime of listening and of challenging himself to transcend a bar set by Art Tatum so many decades ago. Coming later in 2021 will be Pasquale Plays Duke, including recordings with his trio and featuring vocalists Samara Joy and Sheila Jordan.
Clips (more may be added)
What's Been Happening?
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
Ruby, My DearProvided to YouTube by Sony Music Entertainment
Ruby, My Dear · Pasquale Grasso
Solo Monk
℗ 2018 Sony Music Entertainment
Released on: 2019-10-11
Composer: Thelonious Monk
Editor, Producer: Matt Pierson
Mastering Engineer, Mixing Engine...
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
Parisian ThoroughfareProvided to YouTube by Sony Music Entertainment
Parisian Thoroughfare · Pasquale Grasso
Solo Bud Powell
℗ 2018 Sony Music Entertainment
Released on: 2020-05-15
Composer: Earl Bud Powell
Editor, Producer: Matt Pierson
Mastering Engineer, ...
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
Sophisticated LadyProvided to YouTube by Masterworks
Sophisticated Lady · Pasquale Grasso
Solo Masterpieces
℗ 2018 Sony Music Entertainment
Released on: 2020-03-06
Composer: Edward Kennedy Ellington
Composer: Irving Mills
Unknown, Producer: Matt Pierson
M...
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
These Foolish ThingsProvided to YouTube by Okeh/Sony Masterworks
These Foolish Things · Pasquale Grasso
Solo Ballads, Vol. 1
℗ 2018 Sony Music Entertainment
Released on: 2019-08-16
Composer: Eric Maschwitz
Composer: Jack Strachey
Editor, Producer: Matt Piers...
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
Yardbird SuiteProvided to YouTube by Masterworks
Yardbird Suite · Pasquale Grasso
Solo Bird
℗ 2020 Sony Music Entertainment
Released on: 2020-08-21
Composer: Charlie Parker
Editor, Producer: Matt Pierson
Mastering Engineer, Mixing Engineer, Recording...
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
Embraceable YouProvided to YouTube by Masterworks
Embraceable You · Pasquale Grasso
Solo Ballads
℗ 2021 Sony Music Entertainment
Released on: 2021-04-09
Composer: George Gershwin
Composer: Ira Gershwin
Unknown, Producer: Matt Pierson
Mastering Enginee...
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A video was posted re Pasquale Grasso:
When I Fall in LoveProvided to YouTube by Okeh/Sony Masterworks
When I Fall in Love · Pasquale Grasso
When I Fall in Love
℗ 2021 Sony Music Entertainment
Released on: 2021-03-19
Composer: Edward Heyman
Unknown, Producer: Matt Pierson
Composer: Victor Young
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WELCOME TO THE INTEGRATED GLOBAL CREATIVE ECONOMY
→ from Brazil: 
vai em português galera!
From the duct flute player below to Quincy Jones to you. And vice versa... pathways throughout a creative world united via the enchanted mathematics of the small world phenomenon, that "magic" which positions billions of us around the planet within some 6 or so steps of each other, those inside this matrix tending to within potentially discoverable steps of all others within, & without.
"At the handle of my hoe..."
Here the matrix was born. And so our official theme: A Massa by Raymundo Sodré & Jorge Portugual
Image: Sebastião Salgado
Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes…
Stoked and steamed and sensual in the broadest sense of the word…
Limned in prosody & cadenced song…
Conceived in a conundrum wrapped in a smile inside an irony…
Dear friend,
The Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil (the fertile crescent around the great Bay of All Saints) was final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Africans fleeing into the sertão (backlands) were joined by Indigenous fleeing slavery and the possession of their lands, and by Sephardim fleeing the Inquisition in Europe. Three cultures from three continents running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Nowhere else but here.
And it is exactly here that our story begins...
You're on a matrix (the transcendent artists below are within it) — in the word's original sense of "source" — of recommendations-in-series concatenating around the planet — this matrix (as odd as this might sound) having begun life as a record shop in Brazil. I'm below left, in the shop, with David Dye for World Café/U.S. National Public Radio...
"Matrixed!"
—founding member Darius Mans (economist, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) / Ex-president & president-elect of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
—Nduduzo Makhathini (piano, Blue Note recording artist)
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (klezmer fiddle; founder of The Klezmatics)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (composer; piano)
"Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (cello)
Our logo is a cane cutter, designed by Walter Mariano of the Federal University of Bahia
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magisterial Brazilian musicians. Our online shop/matrix "radio" — featured in The Guardian — www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/apr/17/10-best-music-radio-station-around-world — was set up and organized on the laptop barely visible there behind me. The interview itself is online at www.npr.org/2013/07/16/202634814/roots-of-samba-exploring-historic-pelourinho-in-salvador-brazil.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar found us (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be — or tend to — at most a handful (or so) of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix, then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré (guitar & leather hat, below), even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
Years ago in NYC (I've lived here in Brazil for 30 years now) I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
Beyond beaches and carnival and tragedies urban and ecological, Brazil contains an Incandescent Country analogous in many ways to the Mississippi Delta and Deep South. This is the Brazilian Nordeste (Northeast), a place unique in the world, into which entered through the great Baía de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints) more enslaved human beings than any other port-of-call throughout the history of mankind. From coastal rainforest into a harsh interior humanity bled into a hot cauldron of Indigenous and Sephardic peoples likewise running from destruction.
And in astounding irony amidst this suffering, music was born: the primordial samba — chula — which journeyed south to Rio de Janeiro to evolve into the national music of Brazil; hinterland manifestations danced in pairs upon pounded earth by the light of lanterns and the moon (“chula” is a Portuguese-language word meaning something of no value, now transmuted into a term of pride).
No time machine is necessary to hear this abiding art. It’s still out there. People who were raised in it, before the arrival of electricity, radio and records, still live. Paramount among these are João do Boi (John of the Ox; clip below) and Raymundo Sodré (image above). Sodré was yanked from poverty and rocketed to national fame in Brazil: a major label deal, a huge hit blasting from every radio from the Amazonian jungle to the urban jungles of Rio and São Paulo. The hit in question was A Massa, Sodré’s defense of the “little” people, the powerless, Sodré’s people. During the dictatorship Sodré career was destroyed. He fled the country to avoid death. He returned nine years later.
Sodré and João are among the last in a great lineage of masters of the moving music of the Recôncavo and the Brazilian Nordeste’s hardscrabble backlands...
Music which is a powerful, passionate distillation of the genius of a multi-stranded culture born in strife and struggle, in a little-known and less understood part of Brazil. Music to assuage suffering by (dis)virtue of the evil that men do.
Music that the entire world could use right now.
Question: Why do matrix media page headers bear an aleph, first letter of the Hebrew alphabet?
Answer: The Matrix was inspired in (the kabbalah-inspired fiction of) Borges' (marvelous short story) El Aleph, that in the pillar in Cairo's Mosque of Amr, where the universe in its entirety throughout all time is perceivable as an infinite hum from deep within the stone...
This "all-seeing" Brazilian "aleph" doesn't hum, however...it dances and sings...
...potent forces derived from its native ground, the Recôncavo proper, where Bahia's primordial samba is danced to upon pounded earth, under moonlight broken by banana, palm and mango leaves, lifting the souls of its participants almost like something religious, which it was, and gods aside, is (João do Boi, black hat right below, with family & friends in São Braz, Bahia):
Create your own media matrix page from the top of this or any matrix page
