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E_LEC_TRIC_ GIT_BOX (Dedicated To Greg Tate)

by Michael Gregory Jackson

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about

Michael Gregory Jackson, the visionary guitarist namechecked as a vital influence by modern masters like Vernon Reid, Brandon Ross, Bill Frisell and Nels Cline, releases his first-ever solo electric guitar album, Electric Git Box (Golden Records). Available exclusively at the artist’s Bandcamp site, the digital offering boasts 11 unaccompanied solo guitar pieces showcasing the breathtaking stylistic scope and technique of this critically-acclaimed and influential guitarist’s singular work. ATTENTION! LINER NOTES EBOOK INCLUDED, PDF FILE DOWNLOAD, ONLY ON COMPUTERS.

The album includes both reinterpretations of Jackson originals dating back to his 1976 solo debut, Clarity, Circle, Triangle, Square, as well as a host of powerful new work. The release will include liner notes comprised of reflections on Electric Git Box from Oliver Lake, Vernon Reid, Bakida Carroll, Ed Motta, Brian Jackson and Brandon Ross, as well as a poem written for the project by authur/playwright/poet Jessica Hagedorn, with additional writings from Jackson.

Jackson says of Electric Git Box, “The nature of beauty is at the core of my being and my music, alongside aggression, passion, fire, and powerful feelings of personal independence and creative freedom. This project was borne of an angst-full period for me, I was feeling inundated with tragedies, the isolation of Covid lockdowns, re-occurring police and vigilante killings of Black people, and living with the omnipresent reality of systemic racism. I was feeling angry, disconnected and erased; thus, I recorded this music with some edges, some distortion, to communicate the multifaceted well of emotions that birthed this performance.”

He goes on to explain, “My guitars, which I’ve called ‘git boxes’ since my teens, have always been my companions and a sanctuary to me, vehicles to help me through the angst of my younger life, and now. Through my guitars, I discovered discipline, self-awareness and inspiration, my git boxes opened a conduit, a dive in deep access and connection to the blues-ness in me.”

“I feel deep gratitude to the writers/musicians—sage spirits, magic makers, risk takers, truthtellers all—who shared their impressions of my Electric Git Box project" says Jackson, "Individually, each of us fully occupy our own creative space, collectively we share an experience that is unique to BIPOC creators, despite the challenges we rise above, create, hold space for, celebrate, and flourish. That we all are out here in the world is a source of comfort, profound strength and healing for me—like my git boxes throughout my life, this sustains me, music is liberation and I am free.”


Black Rock Coalition pioneer and Living Colour co-founder Vernon Reid observes, Jackson’s Electric Git Box “…is truly a solo record, there are no overdubs, there is no Fripp-style looping, with the exception of very subtle delay & modulation effects, Michael’s guitar is unadorned except for amp or room reverb,” with sonics sometimes overdriven to provide an emotional grit against the lush chording and single note lines. Jackson recorded the album with a return to the choice instrument of his early 1970s New York loft jazz scene days, a 1959 Gibson SG, played through a vintage Polytone amp, he also plays a Fender Stratocaster, both recorded with an array of classic microphones.

Electric Git Box opens with a recent original, “Karen (Sweet Angel),” an evocative ballad dedicated to his lady love, one which contrasts wide open chording and deep harmony with quicksilver melodies and fills. On “Sweet Rain Blues,” Jackson revs up a gut bucket blues, one that Reid characterizes as “simultaneously rural, urban, then veers off into considerations of what’s really happening when the sun is shining although it’s raining in your heart”, while on “Wish” Jackson’s blues has a distinct sarod-like tonality. On another recent original, “Hymn for My People,” Jackson recites a funereal slow, ultra mournful tone poem – largely in single note lines, while “Perseverance” is a driving anthem, as unrelenting as its title. Both, according to the artist "are inspired by the struggle and defiant spirit of my ancestors, and artistic predecessors in all idioms, and all freedom fighters in the fight for the liberation of all oppressed peoples.”


With “Preleuoionti,” Jackson reprises the acoustic guitar showpiece from his 1976 debut disc recorded as a 23-year-old, Clarity, Circle, Triangle, Square. This version has a new depth, one that only time and his mastery of the tonality of the electric SG can add. Another reinvented classic, “Theme X (For Geri Allen),” is a tribute to the late composer and keyboard master, an associate from his early days in New Haven and New York in the 1970s, a composition first heard on Jackson’s 2019 disc, WHENUFINDITUWILLKNOW, with his Clarity Quartet. Ornette Coleman is the dedicatee on “JcakJcak (for Ornette),” a rapid fire, sometimes dissonant rollercoaster of melody first heard on his Spirit Single Strata trio album with drummer Kenward Dennard and bassist Keith Witty, and his Clarity Quartet collection, After Before. The same two albums included “Meditation in E (For Karen),” another airy ballad that showcases Jackson’s unique harmonic sense and bluesy sheets of sound soloing.

“Michael’s powerful and melodic & rhythmic sensibilities imbues all these pieces with tactile energy,” Vernon Reid notes. “Michael Gregory Jackson has always cut a singular musical path on his journey through many genres that have been his wheelhouse, through many schools of jazz, alternative rock and even Avant folk. This collection of solo electric guitar may be Michael’s most personal musical exploration yet.”

Brazilian multi-genre legend Ed Motta weighs in, echoing the theme of freedom, “Freedom seems so far from us. We were taught we could not be free. Michael Gregory Jackson’s career is an ode to freedom, aspects of all music are there, always deep, always sincere.”

World Saxophone Quartet co-founder and bandleader Oliver Lake, who helped propel Jackson onto the international scene with his namesake quartet in the 1970s, adds: “Vibrant, lyrical, melodic, inventive, inspiring, complete and brilliant – these are just a few of the words that describe the solo guitar music of Michael Gregory Jackson. A true original, not to be missed.”

Acclaimed trumpeter and frequent collaborator Baikida Carroll concurs: “Michael Gregory Jackson is a guitarist, singer, composer, lyricist, producer, bandleader and conceptualist who has cultivated an uncanny knack of grabbing you by the imagination and taking you on a joyride. The entire album is bathed in beauty; it’s another breathtaking experience, another exquisite gem from the fertile mind of Michael Gregory Jackson!”

“With Electric Git Box," Michael “…effortlessly creates new space where there was none. He never beats you over the head with his virtuosity”, observes Brian Jackson, venerable producer, pianist, songwriter and long time Gil Scott-Heron collaborator. “What is even more stunning is his mastery of musical emotion, the transmission of whatever feeling he intends to convey. Whether it’s to stir your soul, to soothe it – or perhaps to do both simultaneously – it happens, and you just have to let it. When you hear Electric Git Box you will not be able to get it out of your head. It will haunt you. It will make you come to it again and again like an oracle because Michael Gregory Jackson is the truth.”

Jackson's fellow musical explorer, and firebrand guitarist Brandon Ross says Jackson is an “early inspiration of mine as well as several other important guitarists of our generation, Michael is legendary. Trailblazer would be an apt term to apply to his revision of the guitar vernacular and cross-genre virtuosity.” Ross goes on to say, “I consider this collection to be a kind of personal, handmade, note to those of us whose respect for the “Technology of Being” endures and persists, indifferent to the allure of the Matrix and its siren calls, tempting us away from the true mission at hand, of hand: Sing Your Song, unceasingly, The Listener is Listening… It’s a note addressed to us all.”

I remember… feet sunk’n deep in the silty, murky, muddy, warm, unpredictable, and frequently frightening waters, this, a state of ambiguity, where the ancestors and now I dwell, and, the spiky pointed world which I inherited, the blue vastness and many other moods and hues of the ever changing skies, green, yellow, brown colors, I felt the wisdom of the knowing trees and blooming flowers, joy, laughter, tears, yes, the profound beauty of rhythms and tones, awakened inside of me, deep sadness and profound joy blent together as one, vibrating strings, electric-magnetic energy, emotive and powerful, music showed me places that I’d never seen, took me back to places I’d never been.
– Michael Gregory Jackson - Electric Git Box 2022

credits

released March 31, 2022

Michael Gregory Jackson -
E_LEC_TRIC_GIT_BOX Dedicated to Greg Tate

Written, Arranged, Performed, Mixed and
Produced by Michael Gregory Jackson
Michael Gregory Jackson - E_LEC_TRIC_GIT_BOX
Michael Gregory Jackson - Art Direction and Design
Photos by Gillian Doyle
Image retouching by Isidro Hurtaldo

Mastered by Todd Levine, Magnetic North Studio,
Woodstock, NY | Recorded by Wayne Peet, Los Angeles, CA |
* Recorded by Michael Gregory Jackson [Tracks 9, 10, 11]

©2021 Michael Gregory Jackson
P Magicolored Music ASCAP
All Rights Reserved

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Michael Gregory Jackson Los Angeles, California

"MGJ first made waves…in New York's loft-jazz scene of the 1970s… alongside such major innovators as Oliver Lake, David Murray, and Wadada Leo Smith, he quietly laid the groundwork for much of what we take for granted in the contemporary jazz-guitar vocabulary." National Sawdust NY

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