Artists like Jerry Granelli never play the fame game. They strive to keep it real and are in music for all the right reasons.

They know, to use Valerie Wilmer’s oft quoted but no less true maxim, this journey to the urge within is as serious as your life. It’s a pity that some uninspired jazz radio DJs use the disparaging term, in their use, that this is simply creative music as if that is a put down (!) (deconstructed: too avant to be played) when they encounter this music but really they need to examine their own lack of creativity and how they set musical boundaries. The listeners should be the judge not the gatekeepers who refuse to let them hear it, and it is an indictment of mass media and even specialist radio that music as good as this is gains so little exposure beyond supporters and those who are really up to speed somehow keeping informed.

I do hope What I Hear Now gets widely heard: it certainly deserves to. The veteran San Francisco-born drummer (surely Bobby Previte, in recent years, must have been copped some of Granelli’s style) a half century ago played with Charlie Brown pianist Vince Guaraldi and by complete contrast embraced psychedelia, opening for Lenny Bruce, joining Light Sound Dimension and sessioning with Sly Stone.

In his seventies now Granelli is still cutting it as a first few listens to this terrific new record definitely show. Two years on from Nowness, the drummer’s duo album with the Gandalf of the keys Jamie Saft, there are seven tracks here moving on past an opening prologue this new record is very free and spiritual yet with a highly layered compositional feel, the rhythm maker at ease and playing loose joined by horns increasingly chamber-jazz like as the album enters deep waters but capable of wildly sprawling touches that know no limits as the album progresses. SG

What I Hear Now (****) is released by Addo Records next week. Jerry Granelli, above. Photo: Addo