This special concert will feature jazz guitar sensation Pasquale Grasso in duo performance with multiple Grammy-winning keyboardist/arranger Gil Goldstein.
Pasquale's Website: https://www.pasqualegrasso.com
Gil's Website: http://gilgoldstein.us
“Over the Rainbow” solo video: https://youtu.be/_l0fPBRsxdo
ABOUT PASQUALE GRASSO: 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.”
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.”
ABOUT GIL GOLDSTEIN: For nearly four decades, pianist/producer/arranger Gil Goldstein has drawn the musical blueprint for some of the most prominent artists in jazz – and in so doing, has become a highly influential figure in his own right. Gifted with an innate sense of compositional structure and harmonic balance, he has forged a diverse career that extends well beyond his own body of recorded work to include alternating turns as an insightful producer, a brilliant arranger and a prolific composer of more than a dozen film scores for the big and small screens.
In addition to his work as a producer and arranger, Goldstein has also been a teacher since the mid-1980s – at the Mead School for Human Development, the New School, and New York University. He is the author of The Jazz Composer’s Companion, a collection of interviews with 15 notable jazz composers, a foreword by Bill Evans, and an overview of the musical materials that – as Evans wrote – “impose no style and thus can be used to extend a musician’s vocabulary.”