Grant Gordy
By Rebecca Frazier
Guitarist Grant Gordy’s improvisational style comes across as wild and free, as untamed and ruggedly elemental as his native Oregon’s coastal bluffs, with rhythmic Pacific tides and waves beating passionately on the shore. In conversation, Gordy’s manner is centered and comfortable, revealing a soft-spoken artist who is deeply contemplative and surprisingly analytical about his own playing. Gordy’s musical evolution—which has spanned almost two decades of recording, touring, and even working as a full-time member of the legendary David Grisman Quintet—embodies a unique brand of artistry within the American soundscape. In the past year alone, he’s released two albums in distinctly American improvisational genres, jazz and bluegrass.
Developing guitar skills in two different, yet related, musical genres is akin to learning to speak two Romance languages fluently—say, French and Italian—and it’s become a part of Gordy’s creative working flow to establish footholds comfortably in both bluegrass and jazz worlds as a native speaker. A Brooklyn resident since 2013, Gordy’s become a regular in the storied New York jazz scene; he relates that “the best compliment I get at a jazz club is when people ask about my background; when I tell them that I play a lot of bluegrass, and they say ‘Oh, I never would have known,’ I’m like YES! I want to be able to speak this language.” And speak it, he definitely does, as evidenced by his 2020 jazz trio album, “Interpreter,” on which he plays electric guitar.
Yet Gordy freely confides that in the bluegrass world, he’s more “comfortable.” The traditional bluegrass standard “Blackberry Blossom” was his first guitar tune, as taught to him by his father, who gifted him a guitar for his thirteenth birthday. Describing his atypical adolescence, he relates that he spent a lot of time alone with his guitar. “At that age I was really into Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, like many American guitarists,” he says. “For some of us, guitar is something we do alongside debate team and field hockey. For me, guitar was the only thing. I was a non-athletic kid, not particularly social. I was a hippie. I went to three different high schools and then dropped out altogether, and then we moved to the desert in New Mexico.” Gordy’s sense of social isolation was assuaged by playing guitar. “I spent a lot of time experimenting with making sounds in my bedroom,” he says.
Eventually he moved with his father to Colorado’s Front Range, where he discovered a healthy music community and was exposed to different genres, like jazz, classic country, and even traditional Bulgarian styles. With his new wider palette of tastes and skills, he was invited to work with jazz and honky tonk professionals in Colorado. As his network grew, he eventually connected with David Grisman and joined Grisman’s quintet (DGQ) in 2008, an international touring unit with whom he worked for over six years.
While working in the DGQ, Gordy released his debut guitar album, “Grant Gordy,” which put him on the map as a unique composer and creative interpreter of classic bluegrass, gypsy jazz, and American traditional music. Shortly thereafter, Gordy relocated to Brooklyn and cultivated relationships in the jazz world there, all the while touring in the bluegrass world. He explains, “I was becoming more interested in bebop and more modern jazz, and I was finding a little less overlap with string music, though borders are becoming more porous now.”
Gordy’s affinity for risk and the experimental nature of his improvisation delight his listeners, who often find humor in his approach. “I have a really high tolerance for atonality and chromaticism and stuff, and sometimes it is funny,” he says. He focuses on listening, and he advises others to do the same. “I’d say working on ears is always the number one thing.” He encourages others to train themselves to identify chord tones by ear. “You can never do too much drilling. I think that will set you up so well to translate what you’re hearing to what you can play,” he explains.
Gordy has remained busy teaching and practicing throughout the quarantine, and this spring he released a traditional folk album aptly titled “Bluegrass and the Abstract Truth” alongside string music stalwarts Alex Hargreaves, Joe Walsh, and Greg Garrison. During the “intense” lockdown situation in New York, he’s found he’s had to focus on separating his analytical nature from his joy of playing in live situations. “If this is a playing situation, then it’s not about me; it’s about what are we creating together. How much is analyzing going to shut me down from hearing what we’re all creating—and even just hearing what the other people are doing—if I’m so worried and so in my head?” He explains that his goal is not to impress others, but to impart “something deeper:” “Music is endlessly fascinating and beautiful, and it can express so much. It can express things that language can’t even express. It feels like that’s the ultimate goal, even if it’s instrumental music.”
And while Gordy has spent years cultivating an international presence on his own terms, he never seems to lose his sense of purpose. “The reason I do music is because it’s fun. It’s engaging. It’s this beautiful fascinating thing—the deeper you go, the deeper it gets, especially playing improvised music. You’re literally conjuring art out of nothing. It’s always new, it’s always fresh. How could I not feel delight at that all the time? I’ve never lost that spark, and I don’t think I ever will.”
Originally published in Americana Rhythm Music Magazine
