Emotional Setbacks Have Inspired Tom Grant to Personalize Music

Let’s get one thing straight, right off the bat: Tom Grant is not complaining about his lot in life.

With the economic downturn hitting all strata of American society--including entertainers--Grant, a keyboardist and composer based in Portland, Ore., seems to be dodging the fusillades of bad monetary tidings.

His last two Verve/Forecast albums sold in the mid-five-figure range, and his most recent project for the label, “In My Wildest Dreams,” which was released last month, has already shown strong response on radio. This week it ranked No. 9 on the New Adult Contemporary chart in Radio and Records magazine, one of the music industry’s key publications for tabulating airplay.

And where other musicians are reporting cutbacks in their touring schedules, Grant, at 45, is steaming right along.

“My band works just about every week,” he said recently, appearing either at the Club Vivo in Portland, where he’s a regular, or on the road. He describes himself as a pop-jazz performer, adding: “I don’t like that title, but I use it for lack of something better.” Along with guitarist Dan Balmer, bassist Jeff Leonard and drummer Carlton Jackson, he appears Thursday and Friday at At My Place in Santa Monica.

But amid this relative plenty, Tom Grant has been hit by some emotional thunderbolts in the past few months. There were the deaths of two close friends, one the noted saxophonist Jim Pepper. Another friend has contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“I’ve been affected, and I want to write songs that will affect others,” he said in a phone interview from his home, where he lives with his wife and stepdaughter. “I want my music to be more personal. The tunes I’m writing now are less raucous, more introspective. I’m sort of mellowing out.”

This is not the first time that Grant, a native of Portland, has known death firsthand: Both his parents died of natural causes before he was 20.

“I was just graduating from high school, entering college, so you could say I was sort of grown up when it happened,” he said. He credits his older brother, who at the time was also a jazz pianist and who was very influential in shaping Grant’s career, with helping him through that period.

Now, it’s music that helps.

“It’s fun to play music, period, whether it’s jazz or pop or classical. It’s inherently satisfying,” he said. “But it’s particularly exhilarating to play for a crowd.”

This attitude, of pleasing himself and the audience as well, doesn’t escape the people Grant ultimately works for: the people who book him.

“Tom’s never done bang-up business here, but he’s done fair business, and since he’s enjoyable to work with, I have him back,” said Matt Kramer, the talent booker at At My Place, where Grant has appeared intermittently since the mid-’80s. “There are any number of nationally touring acts that are unpleasant. Tom’s not like that.”

In person, Grant goes beyond the pop-jazz material that dominates his albums to present a wider spectrum of contemporary music, from Cajun and R&B--;”We do a lot of those”--to straight-ahead jazz selections. “I like all kinds of music, and I don’t deny myself any of it, indulgent man that I am,” Grant said, allowing himself a laugh.

Grant figures that if you get an audience to open up to you, then you can play anything, and the listeners will be receptive. Such as when he plays a modern jazz classic by, say, Charlie Parker or Miles Davis.

“We do a tune like that pretty much as anybody else would, and sometimes an audience will go for that more than for our usual pop-jazz stuff because it’s such a change,” he said. “Other times, the crowd will just sit there, as if it’s wondering what we’re doing. But usually a crowd will go with you, teeing off on the energy that’s emitted from the stage.”

The keyboardist’s live performances almost always include a version of the late Pepper’s noted “Witchi-Tai-To,” the tune that blends an American Indian chant--Pepper was an American Indian--with jazz soloing. Grant was on the saxophonist’s late ‘60s Embryo label album that debuted the song; the tune has also been recorded by pianist Keith Jarrett and the group Oregon.

“I recorded it on my ‘Tom Grant’ Chase Music Group label album, but it was kind of watered down,” he said. “Now I make it an epic, often starting with a chant. It’s a beautiful tune that’s total magic. It always captures the audience.”

Just because the keyboardist cuts loose more in a nightclub than on a recording isn’t to say that the 10 albums he’s made during his career don’t have merit. Grant writes hummable, danceable tunes that, as he puts it, “have rock-type rhythms, and have pop-type melodies that are geared to baby boomers, people that grew up on the Beatles.”

But there’s a strong jazz element, too, he insists, “though purists hate what I do because it’s not straight-ahead jazz,” he says. “I have jazz roots. I listened to jazz a lot when I was young. My idols are Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver and the musicians, and I improvise on every tune,” he says.

Grant began piano studies at the age of 6, studying classically with Elizabeth Tressler, a Viennese-trained teacher who worked with him on how to touch the piano, how to draw sound out of it. Later, as a teen-ager, his teachers were the records by Miles Davis and others that Grant’s father, who owned a record store, brought home.

Armed with a master’s degree in music from the University of Oregon, Grant settled into a routine in the ‘70s of teaching school by day and performing by night. At an after-hours engagement, he was spotted by the late trumpet great, Woody Shaw, who used him for a Portland performance. Shaw then recommended Grant to tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, with whom Grant played in the mid-’70s. After three years with drummer Tony Williams, starting in 1979, Grant formed his own band with fellow musicians in Portland.

“I like building my base with hometown players,” said Grant of his quartet, which has been together for six years. “We hit a nice groove.”

Though Grant might become better-known if he moved to a larger, more cosmopolitan city, right now, for him, there’s no place like home. “Portland’s beautiful,” he said. “I live in town, but it’s woodsy. To me, it’s a special place: so clean and livable.”