Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Steve Grover was born February 26, 1956 in Lewiston, Maine and studied with jazz drummer and teacher Dick Demers. He studied at Berklee School of Music and the University of Maine, and landed a gig with guitarist Lenny Breau, working with him on and off for the next few years, learning the subtleties of small group interplay with a master musician.

In 1979, Grover attended a program at The Creative Music Studio, the music school run by Karl Berger, which had such visiting artists as Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, Lee Konitz, Bob Moses, and other musicians. At CMS, he was exposed to the concepts of artists from the world of jazz, new music, and world music.

The 1980s saw Steve team up with clarinetist Brad Terry, saxophonist Charlie Jennison and bassist John Hunter to form a group called The Friends of Jazz. The group played host to visiting artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Tate, Gray Sargent and others while occasionally reconstituting itself with pianist Chris Neville, trombonist Tim Sessions, bassists John Lockwood and Tom Bucci, guitarist Tony Gaboury, and others.

In 1985, Grover composed his Blackbird Suite, a song cycle setting for the Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird. Further explorations of this piece continued into 1994, when Blackbird Suite won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz/BMI Jazz Composers Competition. For the first time the music involved the vocalist Christine Correa and the pianist Frank Carlberg, who performed the piece at the Kennedy Center in 1994, as part of the Monk Institute’s competition. When a CD of the music was finally released in 1997, the reviews were excellent. Drummer and composer Steve Grover continues to compose, perform and record.

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