Atlanta Music category interest

Joe Gransden and his Big Band will be performing a concert called 100 Years of Swing at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church (PRUMC) on Sept. 22.

The show is sponsored by the Atlanta Music Club, the city’s oldest chartered nonprofit music organization. The band will also be playing a similar show on Sept. 25 at the Eagle Theater in Sugar Hill.

Big band music has been a part of Gransden’s life since he was a young man. Ahead of the show at PRUMC, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Gransden about his life and career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I wanted to talk to you about how you started with the trumpet. I read that your grandfather played it – did that have anything to do with why you picked it up?

Joe Gransden: Yeah, sure did. I grew up in a very musical household. My father is still to this day a great jazz piano player and singer, and my mother was always in the arts. She was a choreographer, and she would act in productions. A lot of folks in the family were musicians and performers. And my father’s father, my grandfather, was a great trumpet player, and lived in New York City his whole life, and would play with all the bands in New York, and some of the touring crews would come through and call him to play in the trumpet section. Every time they would come to visit us, he would practice, and I would sit outside the door and listen to him practice, and I fell in love with the sound of it. It’s almost all because of him that I chose that instrument.

I read a quote from you where you said when you were starting out – and I guess this is true of any instrument or any genre – you started by trying to emulate the greats at first, like Miles Davis, etc. Then you grew your own style out of that. How long do you think it took for you to really find your style and how would you describe it?

Gransden: It took me a long time. There’s a wonderful quote by Miles Davis, where he says, sometimes it can take a long time to learn to play like yourself. Because as jazz musicians, like you said, we try to emulate the guys who came before us. Our heroes. We try to sound like them and play like them and swing like them. It’s very very difficult – you almost never get as good as they were anyway.

As time goes by, all your favorite influences [go into] a funnel, your own sound comes out. For some jazz musicians, it’s pretty early on. Some jazz musicians are very identifiable right off the bat. For me, it was most of my high school years and college years and professional years up until about, I would guess my 32nd or 33rd birthday – 34 years old, maybe – I started feeling like I sounded like Joe. It doesn’t mean that I still don’t sound like my favorites, like Chet Baker and Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard. I still try to emulate them all the time, but I think I have my style now.

I know you were born in New York and worked up there for a while. How did you eventually make your way down to Atlanta?

Gransden: I was born in New York and lived in New York City for a while, and Buffalo is where I went to high school. I did a couple years of college south of Buffalo at Fredonia State College [State University of New York at Fredonia]. During that time, my father, his job transferred him from Buffalo to Atlanta. I took a year off of college, and I went on the road and traveled the world with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. When that tour ended and I was gonna quit the band and finish school, my family had relocated to Atlanta. So I decided, instead of staying in Fredonia and Buffalo, I decided to transfer to Georgia State University, and that’s what brought me down here.

Liked it enough to stay, I guess.

Gransden: I finished college at Georgia State in the early 90s, and then I went back to New York City two or three times, and lived there for a year, or two years, or three years. But I’ve been back here full time since about 2002.

The Big Band originally formed in 2009. I wondered if you could talk about putting that group together and how it has evolved over time?

Gransden: When I played with the bands of Tommy Dorsey – and I also played with Glenn Miller’s Orchestra for quite some time, I traveled with them – I always enjoyed that sound. I always enjoyed playing in the section and hearing all those horns, hearing all those great songs and arrangements, never thinking that I would have my own band of that size. When I moved to Atlanta for good in the early 2000s, I did put together a quartet, a trio, and we played at all the restaurants and clubs here in town for quite a while. But there was a specific club called Cafe 290 – which is no longer around, since COVID, unfortunately. It took that place out. But Cafe 290 was one of Atlanta’s number one jazz clubs for 30 plus years. It was a little bit of a bigger club, and it had a bigger stage. I had a very good relationship with the owner, John Scatena.

I was throwing around the idea of me doing a steady gig at Cafe 290, once a month or twice a month, or maybe even once A week. And so I just started getting the feeling that maybe I could try this lifelong dream I’ve had of having my own big band. Maybe this is the venue that it could work at. It’s got a bit enough stage, good acoustics, and lots of local people to come. They served dinner there too, so it was almost like a dinner theater.

I put the band together, and instantly it took off. Instantly, it was standing room only. It was our swing board to the music scene in Atlanta as far as big band and the Southeast. Out of that gig at Cafe 290, we played hundreds and hundreds of gigs, recorded records and played with special guest artists because of that steady job we had there. It was almost like a paid rehearsal. That started the big band, and we kept it going through financial tough times. It’s still alive and well, and it’s actually stronger now than it’s ever been.

I can imagine putting that sort of thing together comes with a lot of challenges. What was the most difficult part about those early years?

Gransden: A couple really difficult things – first of all, the business side of having a big bang, if you don’t have a whole team of people running the show for you. I had to do it all myself. I had to book the musicians, I had to book the venue, I had to write the contracts … the setlist. So the trumpet started to take a little bit of a backseat with all the business work that needed to be done.That was difficult at first, but it taught me the music business on a really high level, more than I could learn from college. I know how to write contracts, I know how to write grants, I know how to do all this stuff because I had to do it, right?

That was one of the big challenges. The second big challenge was we wanted to play music from the swing era, but we didn’t want to play the exact sheet music arrangements that were played back in the 30s and 40s and 50s. So I had to find somebody locally who could write arrangements for big bands. I found a guy, who happened to be one of my best friends. His name is Wes Funderburk. Wes plays lead trombone in my big band, and he has written – I’m going to guess, 75 to 85% of the arrangements that we play were done by him. And it has its own sound because of that. Nobody sounds like us because we have our own actual arrangements that we’ve had done.

What can attendees expect of this upcoming performance?

Gransden: This performance is Sunday [at PRUMC], and then we do it again on Wednesday [September] 25th at the Eagle Theater in Sugar Hill … We’re going to be celebrating the sounds of the great big bands, and I’ll name a few; bands like the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James – we’ll be celebrating all of these big bands. I put a show together that I think really pops and has a nice flow to it, and creates a lot of energy with a lot of familiar songs that even people today may know.