 New...The Ghost Opera ... Improvised ensemble music of the highest order...re-issued on CD for the first time since it's 1970 release. Groundbreaking music that has more than stood the test of time. Musical director W. A. Mathieu.
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 Game / No Game (21 Improvisations) ....listen.... review 1 review 2 Allaudin Mathieu-piano, and George Marsh-extended drumset, in an album of music "games" and short improvisations.
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 Fast & Odd ....listen .... review1 .... review2 Neo-Balkan
Jazz and Concert Music composed by David Evan Jones.
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 Upon
A Time .... listen .... reviews: scroll down the page, reviews2 An album of duets, the first half with John
Abercrombie and the
second half with
Mel
Graves.
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 In C .... listen .... review (a very special performance of one of the most important pieces of the 20th century "minimal movement") with a huge cast of characters including the Kronos Quartet and the Rovas.This is the first recording that includes drumset. |
 In
The Moment .... listen .... review scroll down the page. More cooking Afro-European-American jazz Chicago style: great tunes and blowing
with
Judy
Roberts, Greg
Fishman, and Nick
Tountas.
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 Endtroducing .... listen ....reviews Endtroducing.... is the first studio album by DJ Shadow, (released in 1996 ). It is unique in that it is built entirely from samples of other audio (vinyl mainly), such as hip hop, jazz, funk, psychedelia, old television shows, interviews, and percussion tracks. The album has been cited in the Guinness World Records as being the first album created completely from sampled sources (I always thought Musique Concrete was the first). If you want to hear the original recording of my philosophy from a 1974 educational record used by DJ Shadow in Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt see Percussion below. Here are the samples that appeared on Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt: "I Need You" by H.P. Riot; "I Feel a New Shadow" by Jeremy Storch; "Planetary Motivations (Cancer)" by Mort Garson; "Music Makers: Percussion" by the Chevron/Standard Oil Company of California (1974) From an interview with George Marsh, jazz drummer, percussionist.
 Percussion (on vinyl) .... George's interview: listen .... The original recording of my 1974 interview on the Standard Oil, Music Maker series called Percussion. See if you can find the part of the interview that was used by Josh Davis (DJ Shadow) and inserted in Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt. There was quite a cast of characters on this original recording: George Marsh, drums, interviewed by Terry Mc Govern. Norton Buffalo, harmonica; Chuck Day, guitar; Mel Graves, electric and acoustic bass; Tom Harrell, trumpet; David Holt, piano; Mel Martin, soprano saxophone; Mike Nock, electric piano; Denny Zeitlin, keyboards and arp synthisizer. The second track on this record is an interview with Kwasi Badu, African master drummer from Ghana. Kwasi demonstrates the talking drums, and all the separate percussion parts of the Adowa which he constructed using multi-tracking. .... Kwasi Badu's interview: listen
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 New...Dawg's Groove ...listen:Dawg Tracks ACD 66.... review 1 review 2 .... 30 years ago the David Grisman Quintet's first album revolutionized the world of acoustic string music. This latest release - Dawg's Groove continues the enduring legacy of that historic album with all new material and a new incarnation of one of the most influential and musically innovative bands in America today.
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 Jimmie Rodgers, A Tribute .... listen .... review The songs of Jimmie Rodgers sung by Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Van Morrison, etc. Jerry Garcia and David Grisman play Blue Yodel #9, recorded a few weeks before Jerry's death.
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 Been All Around This World ....listen .... Some great Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. This also includes another version of Blue Yodel #9, Jerry's last recorded performance.
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 DGQ 20 .... listen .... review: scroll down the page A twenty year retrospective of the David Grisman Quintet. Need I say more?
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 I'm Beginning to See the Light .... listen .... review1, review 2, review 3 Dawg Jazz with David Grisman, Martin Taylor, and Jim Kerwin.
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 Maria Muldaur, Songs For The Young At Heart ... Maria has assembled some of the best musicians around to help create a magical partnership of old meets contemporary. David Grisman, Capt. Dan Hicks, George Marsh, Norton Buffalo & Roy Rogers.
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 Maria Muldaur, On The Sunny Side .... listen .... Maria Muldaur, Jennie May Muldaur, Fred Penner (vocals); Rick Montgomery (guitar); Steve Tamborski (slide guitar); David Grisman (banjo, mandolin); Jim Rothermel (clarinet, whistle, harmonica, saxophone); John Burr (piano, keyboards); Rowland Salley (bass); George Marsh (drums).
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 Mirror
Image .... listen .... review Jazz
with lots of interplay featuring Randy Vincent,
Bob Afifi,
and
Mel
Graves.
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 Homage .... listen: scroll down the page....Blanco, composed by Mel Graves, features George Marsh on percussion and Thomas Buckner voice. Tsunami, composed by Mel Graves and George Marsh, features George on percusion, Mel on bass and Tom vocals. Homage features Buckner, Marsh, and Graves in short improvistions which give homage to our long and deep friendship.
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 Ear
Shot ....listen: scroll down the page ....review: scroll down the page. Great compositions and arrangements by Mel
Graves with
lots of blowing
featuring Mel Graves, Bob
Afifi, Randy
Vincent, Harvey Wainapel, Al Bent and Pete Estabrook.
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 Quintessence .... listen ....
(Exciting piano trio music with friends from St. Louis who "gave
me my start" when
I was 16) with Herb Drury and Jerry Cherry. |
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 Primordial Lovers MM .... review: scroll down the page Two albums of the music of Essa Mohawk. The original abum, Primordial Lovers, was recorded in 1970 and received a five star rating in Downbeat magazine and was cited in a 1977 Rolling Stone review as one of the "25 all-time best albums." The other musicians on that record were Jerry Hahn, guitar; Mel Graves, bass; and George Marsh, drums. |
Vinyl
(Jazz / Rock / Fusion) |
 Listen (featuring Mel Martin) .... listen to Aural Hallucination by Mel Martin and George Marsh, with Andy Narell, tenor steel drums, Jeff Narell, tenor steel drums, Dave Dunaway, bass, and Larry Dunlap, Fender Rhodes electric piano. This band played a very futuristic fusion (1977) of Jazz, odd time signatures, rock, Latin and free improvisation... Very popular jazz group in the S.F. Bay Area at that time. The album won a Bammy award for best album of the year. |
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 The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood .... (Very rare, available on vinyl only ) It features Jerry Hahn, Mel Graves, Mike Finnigan and myself in a very early (1970) realization of fusion). There has been a lot of talk about the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood since Verlyn Klinkenborg's op-ed article apperared in the NY Times. Jerry tried to get the album released on CD without any luck...let's hope this will change things.
Here's Verlyn's original unedited article:
Caught in the limbo of vinyl: the case of the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood.
In a digital world
Some good things
Get left behind.
The other day a song popped into my head, just a few up-tempo instrumental phrases—guitar, bass, drums, and a Hammond B3 organ. I knew instantly what it was, though I hadn’t heard it in at least twenty years. It was a passing moment from “Martha’s Madman,” the first song on the first side of an LP called “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood.” I bought the record when it was released in 1970. I was a freshman at Berkeley. It would have been easy to see the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood performing that year, though I never did. They were all over the Bay Area—the Matrix, Fillmore West, a Family Dog performance out on the Great Highway. They even made it to the Fillmore East in June. Then they broke up. One year together, one LP on a major label, and that was that.
The record mattered to me and, I think, to a lot of other people—the bright, aggressive playing of the guitarist, Jerry Hahn, the organ and white-blues vocals of Mike Finnigan, and the almost perversely accomplished rhythm section of Mel Graves on bass and George Marsh on drums. It was a sunny mixture of straight-up jazz with a blues spine, a music that wants the latter-day word “fusion,” though that word does so little good. Above all, the record was a reminder of the eclecticism of the time. Audiences that would soon diverge found themselves packed in a hall together all night long, like one October weekend at Fillmore West when the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood (who covered Ornette Coleman, after all) shared the bill with Van Morrison and Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band.
I heard “Martha’s Madman” in my head, and I did what I usually do. I went to the iTunes Music Store. Nothing. Same at Amazon. So I walked down to the barn, where all my old albums are stored, and dug out my vinyl copy of “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood,” which is now sitting on my desk. I no longer have the equipment to play it. Nearly every album in those boxes in the barn was converted to CD long ago—some of them, like Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew,” several times over. But not “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood,” even though it was originally released by Columbia Records—the same label Miles Davis recorded for.
We live, of course, in an age of accelerating digital replication. Before long, it seems, every recording of every kind in existence, along with all the out-takes, will have been turned into a CD or a DVD or a digital file for download over the Internet. But some things get left behind, and not just the information abandoned by the compression algorithms used to produce files like mp3s. Digital conversion seems almost effortless, a virtual transcription of the world as we know it. But there is a financial friction to it nonetheless. These days it’s no longer necessary to produce an actual physical CD to sell in record stores. Downloadable files will do—no packaging required—but even making these has its costs. What it takes to push a work from analog to digital is a marketing opportunity, the death, for instance, of Johnny Cash and a movie based on his life—a wonderful chance, as one industry spokesperson put it, to revisit his inventory, which, as it happens, is partly on Columbia, a company now owned by Sony BMG.
There will probably never be a movie based on the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, no commercial incentive to re-master and re-release this album. The story of the band is a good one but all too familiar—the inevitable clash between the artistic and business sides of the recording industry. The band fell apart disputing the honesty of their manager. What’s left is an orphaned vinyl LP. The inner sleeve, a space for record company promotion, says, “If It’s in Recorded Form, You Know It’ll Be Available on Records.” Well, I wish it were available on CD.
I talked to Jerry Hahn the other day. He teaches jazz guitar in Wichita, his hometown. He’ll be 66 in September, with grandkids. He sounds good. “You should have heard us,” he said. He also said that the master tapes of “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood” are stored somewhere in New York state. The man who produced the record has retired to Hawaii, where he and his wife own several restaurants. George Marsh and Mel Graves both compose and teach jazz in California. Mike Finnigan has played with nearly everyone on the planet, from Jimi Hendrix to Crosby, Stills and Nash, with whom he still tours. I haven’t been able to track down the manager. I’d like to hear his side of the story.
And as for hearing “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood,” one fan has posted the whole album in mp3 form—ripped from the vinyl—on the web. I downloaded it the other day. It’s a digitally compressed version of an analog recording that was, according to Hahn, too compressed to begin with. Even through the mist you can still hear the brightness of the music. But someone needs to find those master tapes, breathe some air into them, and do this minor masterpiece (and all the out-takes) justice at last. I’d buy a copy, especially if I thought that some of the purchase price might make its way to the artists.
(Also check out Tabula Rasa's blog for some insightful reflections on the album.)
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Gong Music by George Marsh and Jennifer Wilsey will be available through this web site in 2008.
We are happy to offer a kind of music that can be listened to closely or used as an accompaniment to daily life.
Gongs, log drums, cymbals, bells, played in the spirit of Pauline Oliveros and Christohper Tree.
 Listen
E-mail address: marshdrummusic@sbcglobal.net
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New...Timeless Pulse Quintet 
Every Mother's Son
Duke, Billy and Tadd 
Paradise
Is Awfully Nice
