Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Jerry Granelli was born Gerald John Granelli on December 30, 1940 in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. Both his father and uncle played the drums and were passionate about jazz. He initially learned the violin for a year, before switching to drums. He spent a day with drummer Gene Krupa in 1948 and hanging out at the Blackhawk and Jimbo’s Bop City soaking in Ellington, Miles, Monk and Max Roach eventually led to him studying with Dave Brubeck drummer Joe Morello.

After two years with Morello he became a highly sought-after session player, Jerry eventually started playing, recording and touring with the Vince Guaraldi Band. He provides the unmistakable steady swing beats for the classic Charlie Brown “Peanuts” theme song.

In the Sixties he moved on to the Denny Zeitlin Trio with bassist Charlie Haden. A hugely successful recording and touring band, they tied with Miles Davis for Group of the Year in Downbeat magazine’s Critics and Readers Poll in 1965. Throughout the decade he performed with Jimmy Witherspoon, Mose Allison, Lou Rawls, John Handy, Sonny Stitt, Sly Stone, Ornette Coleman and Dewey Redman. His free-form improvisational trio held down the opening slot for comedian Lenny Bruce for three months in 1963, and shared bills with Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead.

From the mid-70s through the 90s he focused on teaching, first at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado and then Seattle Washington’s Cornish Institute, the Conservatory in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin, Germany.

During the 80s he toured and recorded in a trio with Ralph Towner and Gary Peacock, and began recording his own projects. From the Nineties until his death, Granelli lived in Halifax and became a Canadian citizen in 1999. In 2010, he released his first solo album, 1313, toured jazz festivals and theaters with his show Tales of a Charlie Brown Christmas, which retold how the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special almost never came to be.

Suffering from a fall in December 2020 that resulted in internal bleeding, he spent three months recuperating in an intensive care unit before being discharged. He died seven months later at the age of 89 on the morning of July 20, 2021, at his home in Halifax.

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