Joel Harrison CD Release

Joel Harrison’s musical journey has few parallels in modern music. Guitarist, composer, arranger, vocalist, songwriter, bandleader – Harrison deftly juggles all of these roles, melding influences from jazz, classical, country, rock, and world music. His expansive sound fits equally well in jazz clubs and concert halls – and the occasional dive bar across town.
For brevity’s sake it would be safest to call Harrison’s home base jazz, a descriptor that mutates to fit a staggering array of styles and approaches. He finds inspiration from music too often barred from admission into the jazz consciousness, taking his place in a tradition of exploration and interpretation that reaches through the open-eared reinventions of Miles Davis and Charles Ives to the American rhapsodies of Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, or Hank Williams.
“Ultimately you’re just trying to arrive at great music,” he says. “Sometimes the best methodology is to leave people to their own devices, and sometimes it’s best to write everything down. It’s that simple.”
Harrison’s success can be seen in the accolades he has received: he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010, is a two-time winner of the Jazz Composer’s Alliance Composition Competition, has received grants from Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, the Flagler Cary Trust, NYSCA, and the Jerome Foundation.
Growing up in 1960s Washington D.C., Harrison became enamored with the inventive guitarists who were blazing the era’s new trails, such as Jimi Hendrix and John McLaughlin. In his twenties, after graduating from Bard College, Harrison undertook what he calls “the classic Jack Kerouac search for America,” hitchhiking cross-country and exploring the rich diversity contained between its coasts. “I wanted to figure this country out.” Sure I was a little naive, yet that search still resonates in my music.
Throughout his journey disparate genres have met in surprising ways. His groundbreaking Free Country ensemble, released on the German label ACT, reimagines country and Appalachian folk music, while his Fojoto Trio with banjo player Tony Trischka and West African kora player Foday Musa Suso ties American roots music to traditional African songs. A new project Skin and Steel, with the young sarod master Anupam Shobhakar explores Indian music, jazz, and American roots.

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