Musical improvisation is often seen as a sort of mysterious process that is difficult to learn. Creative songwriting is similarly characterized in popular mythology as haphazard and inaccessible to ordinary mortals. However, both the art of improvisation and the art of songwriting can be fostered and cultivated through approaches that are both accessible and tangible. In this workshop, internationally renowned jazz cornetist Kirk Knuffke, and local musician Brian Jasper Hull, of Jasper Grooves Collective and Meadowlark Jivin, will be teaming up for a two day workshop focusing on the creative musical process and effectively integrating improvisation into one’s own songwriting and performance.

Hull is a songwriter, poet and guitarist who draws from influences as diverse as soul, blues, jazz, Brazilian and Caribbean sounds. Knuffke grew up here in Fort Collins and has since relocated to New York City where he has built an extensive resume of recordings and musical projects. Knuffke, who has taught at the renowned Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, has drawn inspiration from the CMS ethos where artists like Don Cherry and the Art Ensemble of Chicago set the standard for participative music workshops.

You might ask, could I benefit from such a workshop? Knuffke, who has worked in collaboration with Karl Berger, the founder of the Creative Music Studio, has drawn extensively from Berger’s teaching philosophy. As Berger put it, “Basic musical training, the kind that does not deal with a particular musical style or with the playing of an instrument, seems to be beneficial for practically anyone. A sense of right timing and rhythmic cycles, for example, seems to be a basic human need. In fact, all the performing arts could benefit from these practices. This is why body discipline, dance, all visual media, poetry, and songwriting are complementary to contemporary musical development.”

All levels and instruments, including voice, are welcome to take part in this unique participatory workshop.

https://www.kirkknuffke.com/

As we make our way into 2022, there’s a lot cooking for Jasper Grooves Collective.

Over the last year, we released several new singles including “Blues for Sisyphus,” “Soulful Machine,” and “Skeletons of Language.” And occasionally, though not as much as we would have liked, we even got out and performed live. In 2022 we’re on track to continue expanding our sonic horizons. Here’s a few things to look forward to as we come closer to getting our second full length album completed.

I’ll be playing solo in the lobby of The Lyric, 1209 N. College Ave., on Friday, February 25. I’ll be doing two 45 minute sets, 5:45-6:30 and 8:15-9 pm, so come catch a film and see some live music, or just come for the live set. Then on March 2, we’ll do a mini version of Jasper Grooves Collective at Odell Brewing from 5-7 pm. Mark Raynes will do the honors on drums and Jo Asker will be on standup bass. Other than upcoming performances Jasper Grooves Collective has been very active recording new tunes.

“Boxing Gloves,” our newest single is slated to be released by February, is probably the most heavily Brazilian-influenced song that JGC has recorded yet. We are thrilled to have brought salsa and jazz maestro Victor Mestas into the studio to lay down the song’s keyboard parts. We also brought in Boulder-based percussionist Carl Dixon to put some serious Brazilian flavor into the mix. And though Michael Olson has often helped JGC as an arranger, we were psyched to add his fretless bass playing on this one.

Lyrically, “Boxing Gloves” is a song that asks questions. The answers depend on who’s answering. Is it the callused expert or is it the openminded child? The same question asked of the pragmatic adult who’s “been there and done that” won’t get the same answer from a child. Which turns the song’s questions right back at the skeptical adults among us. We’ve learned a lot but is there still room left in our hearts for the messiness of unpragmatic love? Every day we’re faced with dilemmas when it comes to who and what we choose to fight for. It’s inevitable to stumble across situations that are uncomfortable. The bad news seems endless. We pass homeless encampments on the fringes of our cities. A bewildered and disoriented baby bird shows up on our back porch after a thunderstorm. Another orphan has arrived in need of help. The weight of the world weighs on our souls. If we aren’t careful, others’ troubles feel like our inconvenience.

We could look the other way. After all, the world is full of skeptics who have given up on the power of love. But children don’t have this luxury. They engage with the world head on. Their openheartedness challenges us to reevaluate. Maybe we could drop the façade of “expertise.” Maybe we could learn something from their beginner’s mind, their so-called naiveté. Those old boxing gloves have spent far too long up in the attic. Maybe it’s time to dust them off.

While “Boxing Gloves” explores the frontiers of samba and soul, another new song “No Man’s Land” features the sound of a traditional Brazilian instrument, the berimbau, in a non-traditional setting. “No Man’s Land” should be released by mid-February or early March. While it’s true that “No Man’s Land” draws heavily from a distinctly Brazilian instrument, it is a song that defies easy classification. Don’t expect a saccharine remake of “The Girl From Ipanema.” Rather than imitating Brazilian classics, we saw it as a chance to explore new hybrids. Imagine a bleak Western landscape, a lonely vehicle traveling on remote mountain roads as a thunderstorm begins to mercilessly rain down onto the song’s protagonist. Think Wall of Voodoo with a dash of Nana Vasconcelos and Augustus Pablo on melodica thrown in for good measure. To put it succinctly, we’re pretty sure, you haven’t heard a song quite like this one before.

Where “Boxing Gloves” explores the human capacity for compassion and love, “No Man’s Land” explores devastating landscapes of impending doom. It’s like getting a front row seat to someone’s meltdown just as things begin to unravel. Things can suddenly take an abrupt turn for the strange. But there’s something beautiful in there all the same. It’s doom, but it’s a beautiful impending doom.

The next song waiting in the wings is “Velcro Shoes.” The song is a tribute to Walter Jenkins Jr. who is a musical mentor for me. When he was playing regularly in Fort Collins, I watched in awe as Walt pulled entire audiences under his spell night after night. As Jenkins made his way onto the stage, the props and respect were palpable in the air. Folks love Jenkins, but isn’t out of deference to his sartorial grandeur, it is something deeper than superficial theatrics. Dressed in sweatpants and Velcro shoes, Jenkins shunned visual gimmicks and instead dazzled the listeners with a cascade of ivory acrobatics serving up, a literal feast for the ears. Soul, funk and blues oozed out of Jenkins’ pores as sweat oozed out of the rapt audience members. While the Velcro might have been overlooked, it wasn’t incidental. Just as the scratchy yin and yang of the Velcro worked like an irresistible gravitational pull, Jenkins’ grooves pulled the audience into a symbiotic swirl of sound and writhing bodies. Anyone, who wasn’t initiated would soon learn not to mess with the man in the Velcro shoes.

As a rule of thumb, funk requires a greasy skillet before any serious cooking gets underway. To grease the proverbial pan, we enlisted veteran Marty Rein to do the honors on bass. Rein spent many years as Jenkins’ bassist, and so we only felt it was right to have another of Jenkins’ proteges on the tune. Beyond bass, the song needed some soulful vocals and we brought in Toni Morgan, one of the Gladys Knight’s famous Pips, who spent many years under the soul-diva’s tutelage. The result is… well, you’ll have to hear it.

The long and short of this message is that we’ve got some exciting new songs in the making. Mark Raynes has been working his magic playing drums, percussion and producing these songs. The chemistry that we’ve developed over the past eight years of collaborating and playing together has only grown stronger and we believe you’ll hear it.

So please reach out and let us know what you’re enjoying and what you’d like to hear from us in 2022! If there are venues you think we should play at, don’t hesitate to let us know. We are definitely inspired to get out and perform live more this year despite the obvious challenges!

I am thrilled to announce the release of “Skeletons of Language” the latest Jasper Grooves Collective single. The song came out of a blend of unexpected elements. Musically, it was fantastic to collaborate with Joe Hoffarth who brought his bassoon into the recording session and offered some sonorities that, honestly, I had never expected would find their way into a funk/rock tune. Who woulda thunk it? You’ll never hear “Peter and the Wolf” the same again.

Adding to the sonic complexity of the song, Andrew Vogt cut loose on his alto saxophone with no other instructions other than, “Give it your best Pharaoh Sanders! Go for it!” Vogt rose to the challenge and then some. Jo Asker laid down a solid bassline and Mark Raynes put just the right groove onto it. The result is a genre-defying funk, free jazz, bassoon inflected, punk song that we think you will really enjoy. On a personal note, if I hadn’t grown up on the innovative sounds of the legendary punk band, The Minutemen, I don’t think I would have had the guts to write this song. So it was definitely appropriate that the song made its debut last year on Mike Watt’s online radio show The Watt From Pedro Show. And, as of today, “Skeletons of Language”  is available wherever you stream your music online. We here at Jasper Grooves Collective hope you find its quirkiness delightful.

Visually, the song is accompanied by a somewhat elusive image brought to life by Fort Collins artist, Baxter Long. Yes, there are cows on TV and yes you are watching them. It’s like a modern hieroglyph and I will leave you, the listener/viewer, to decipher it.

On a lyrical level, it was inspired by what was going on in 2020, but that is only half the story. We are still dealing with “skeletons of language” in 2021. Unfortunately, they aren’t going anywhere soon.

You might ask, just what is a skeleton of language? Maybe we should turn that question around. What is healthy language? What does full-bodied, vibrant and ambidextrous language look like? It’s a language without constraints, right? Straight talk. The truth and nothing but the truth. Let’s face it. All of us were naïve back in junior high. Maybe we were hoping to find a bold language, gutsy and unafraid to express what it sees, a language that jukes, jives, parries and, above all, isn’t ossified. Maybe we were all under the impression that folks around us were free to tell it like it is. But shine a spotlight on the wreckage of discourse in the twenty-first century, and all you see is mangled diction. It’s coming down to the wire, and we’ve spent far too long gargling in the rat race choir. At least that’s how Robert Zimmerman and a guy from Crazy Horse once put it.

What are skeletons of language? They are the stripped down words, the impoverished words that sit uselessly in the mouth like spent chewing gum devoid of flavor and are only spoken out of necessity. They are acronyms accompanied by an elevator music soundtrack, attempting to distill intense human feeling and emotion into flat two-dimensional substitutes of lol and lmao? WTF? Texting fingers flail away at the speed of light racing to keep up with ever faster microchip processors. Abbreviated emotions, abbreviated sonnets, abbreviated thoughts, SMS bots choke the airwaves. We’re trying to stay real but emojis aren’t going to cut it. As mom used to say, “use your words.”

These skeletons are complex words with historical implication eviscerated into guttural grunts. Like guacamole, n. from Nahuatl (Aztecan) ahuaca-molli, from ahuacatl "avocado" + molli "sauce, something ground" moler “to grind”  stripped down to meaningless monosyllables like guac.

“Put some guac on my junk,” says the dystopian burrito eater in a chain restaurant whose décor  pretends to be Aztec and where the overworked and underpaid descendants of real Aztecs have to suffer through the butchering of their native tongue, bastardized by the new conquistadors.

At 30,000 feet, the smooth talking pilot warns about an “air pocket,” a euphemism for turbulence. He uses the substitute term half-afraid that his passengers won’t understand the word turbulence, and half-afraid that they can’t handle the naked truth. Truth is, they’re about to get whipped around like hapless chihuahuas in the backseat of a Ford 150 driven by an oversexed adolescent, but nobody will let you say that.

The skeletons are all around us. In theaters of war, soldiers are killed by “friendly fire,” targeted civilians become “soft targets,” when their infrastructure is blown up it becomes “collateral damage.” Language becomes a house of mirrors where we’re left to choose between untangling the actual meanings or getting lulled into the doublespeak sleep. The mendacious lullaby.

This all might seem slightly depressing, but the truth-speakers are still out there fighting to raise their voices above the din. Sanity doesn’t always prevail, but it will never give up and the light is undying despite the public image spin and the brokers of disinformation. Yes, truth still gets spoken and when we hear it, we need to thank those who have the courage to speak it. Our lives are enriched by those who still believe that heartfelt speech can change the world we live in for the better.

Every song starts somewhere. Something clicks. Something grabs the ear. A melody or a rhythm arrives from nowhere. Stop the world. Stop the car. That could be a song. Like a hunter searches his prey, a songwriter is always on the lookout for the next source of inspiration. And occasionally a gift appears. A song arrives at the doorstep seductively wrapped in nothing but rhythm. “Soulful Machine” the next single to be released on August 6 by Jasper Grooves Collective, is such a song.

It came with a readymade groove. I was reading a mundane to-do list and the dishwashing machine in the kitchen was just another noisy machine in the background. But suddenly it dawned on me that there was more than meets the ear. That soulless contraption of gears, pumps and sparkling detergent was strangely laying down a solid, Caribbean groove. I perked up my ears, sang an improvised melody, and things began to come together. Soulful machinery, polyrhythmic dishwasher, syncopation machination…The feeling of paradox was immediate and inescapable. How could a machine, especially a machine made to perform such a banal task as dishwashing, conjure up visions of marimbas and trombones and tropical nights? It was simultaneously ludicrous and beautiful.

That said, I wasn’t going to write a song about a washing machine. I’ll leave that to someone else. When the bards of yore spoke about being visited by the muses, rattling washing machines aren’t exactly what comes to mind. But soulful machines, now that’s something that piques the imagination. In a world where the line between human and machine is becoming blurred, the distinction between the real and the digital loses its sense. One can’t quite separate the real deal from the brilliant fake and maybe we don’t really want to know. Maybe we’d prefer not to delve too deeply into the mirage for fear of what awaits us on the other side. And just who are all these people anyways? People will tell you anything to try and seduce you. Strangers in bars tell us about their old hometown and their old schools, but are their memories real or have they been insidiously implanted by their makers? And how would they even know anyhow? Their whole life gives off the tell-tale stench of a well-orchestrated lie. There’s no use in denying that there are replicants in our midst, contrived beings conceived by amateur gods, drunk on their own hubris.

But wait a second, let’s not get carried away. I was just toying with ideas, riffing on sci-fi fantasies, like John Coltrane used to riff on blues scales. In fact, “Soulful Machine” is a dance song. It’s a love song. Seriously, it’s a song about love at first sight that delves into the animalistic realm of pheromones, sweat and lust on the dance floor. There’s no reason to believe that the stranger who has just led us onto the dance floor is anything other than the genuine article. And obviously we would know the difference, right? Of course we would know the difference. How ridiculous to suggest it would even be possible to concoct a convincingly seductive being, all fabricated with microchips and genetic artifice. Pernicious nonsense. Anyhow, I shouldn’t lead you on any longer. After all, it’s you the listeners who will ultimately decipher what “Soulful Machine” means and whether there is reason to doubt ourselves on the dance floors and digital screens of our lives….

So keep an eye out for Jasper Grooves Collective’s latest tune to be released on Friday August 6! You’ll be able to find it wherever you find your music online. Please consider purchasing the song for your personal library and share widely if you enjoy what you hear!

What a year it has been! I hope all of you are getting back into the groove and feeling some sense that things are going to be alright!

Despite the pandemic, I am happy to say that music has continued and if anything it has been a rich period for creative exploration and reflection. I’ve been pretty quiet as of late about my musical endeavors, so I wanted to share some news about both the collective, Jasper Grooves Collective, and my solo work as Brian Jasper Hull. Along with Mark Raynes, Jo Asker and numerous other musical cohorts, I’ve managed to get about 5 new songs recorded and produced over the past year. Some of them will be released as singles from Jasper Grooves Collective and a couple from myself, Brian Jasper Hull. As the songs keep coming and the inspiration keeps flowing, I wanted to keep all of you in the loop about upcoming releases. You will be the first to know that the songs are coming out! This week on Friday July 9, “Blues for Sisyphus,” a Jasper Grooves Collective original, will be officially released on streaming platforms or wherever you find your music.

So why, you might ask, does Sisyphus have the blues? For aficionados of Greek mythology, you already know that Sisyphus was an inveterate rascal who pushed his luck too far with the gods. And for this rascality, he was condemned to perpetually push a rock up a hill whose summit he could never quite reach. At the moment of truth, the rock would frustratingly roll back to its starting place and Sisyphus would stubbornly try again. It’s an image that the French philosopher Albert Camus found to be a perfect metaphor for the modern human condition. And nowadays it ain’t just poor Sisyphus who’s stuck in the muck and the mire; it’s the daily absurdity that we all live in. It’s the grind, the workaday world, the hamster wheel. Some days there’s no denying it, we’re just treading water even if we know we were meant to fly. So that’s the thematic basis for this modern blues with ancient roots.

Beyond mythological themes, the song has its fair share of musical roots. It’s not a sad blues but a funky declaration of going beyond the blues, transcending the blues. It was exciting to get Walter Hannah on board playing organ for this one. Hannah is a Colorado-based keyboardist who I’ve wanted to work with for a long time. His touch on Hammond organ was the perfect match for the tune. It was also auspicious to get longtime collaborator Andrew Vogt on baritone sax to add some serious grease into the mix. As for the rhythm section, the usual suspects Mark Raynes played drums and Jo Asker held down the low end.

On the level of what inspired the tune, my experience has been that every song has an initial inspiration whether musical, visual or otherwise. The initial spark for Sisyphus was inspired by a good buddy of mine who regularly drops gems in his conversations. I will keep his identity on the lowdown as he generally prefers keeping things enigmatic and shadowy. Once I started getting the melody composed, I was undeniably influenced by the soulful vocals of Angelo, Fishbone’s lead singer, who has been a huge inspiration to me, ever since I first crossed paths with his music back in the 80s. If you happen to know Angelo pass the tune his way. I think he’d dig it!

A final version will be released on all your favorite streaming devices this Friday, July 9! Please check it out, buy a version for your collection, and share widely if you’re inspired. We don’t have plans to release a physical album just yet, but if I hear from enough of you that you’d love a vinyl or a CD, a full length project could well be forthcoming. Following this release, we will be periodically releasing more singles, including a new one called “Soulful Machine” that is a sort of homage to Blade Runner inspired by a dishwashing machine. More on that later… Please stay in touch and let us know what you think about “Blues for Sisyphus” and the other new tunes soon to be released.

Also, rumor has it that a Jasper Grooves Collective gig might be in the works for September over at Odell Brewing Co in Fort Collins… Stay tuned…

This week, we released the first single from the upcoming album “Ain’t Got No Dream.” You can find it on all platforms including I-tunes, YouTube and CD Baby where you can buy the single.

https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/jaspergroovescollective Also, if you connect with the music, please add a like or a short review to help spark some interest in this project. It’s worth saying that the song is over 6 minutes long and it even has an orchestral style arrangement at the end! When “Hey Jude” came out in 1968 at more than 7 minutes in length it was extremely rare to record extended length pop music, and even more rare that it turned out to be so successful. Here’s hoping attention spans in 2019 are still equipped for listening beyond 6 minutes ;)