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As a teenager Gregorio had a vague interest in design and machines that would later develop into a love of constructivist art, but the Chicago-style jazz of Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Max Kaminsky, and Pee Wee Russell held greater sway. He picked up the clarinet at 13, found classmates to jam with, and a few years later, after becoming enamored with the cerebralism and emotional restraint of proto-cool-jazz pianist Lennie Tristano, took up the alto sax as well. At the time, record companies like Pacific Jazz frequently used modern art on album covers, and before long Gregorio was making connections on his own, reading books on art, architecture, and design while exploring contemporary art music–Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, electronic music, musique concrete.
Most of Gregorio’s performances in that decade were unrepentantly experimental, and his jazz vocabulary gathered dust. He engaged in collective improvisation a la AMM using graphic scores–notations involving shapes, colors, and other visual stimuli that are often works of art in themselves. Once he and three other musicians camped out on the four corners of an intersection and played music according to codes that corresponded to the speed, color, and movements of passing vehicles. And in the late 60s, caught up in the playful spirit of the Fluxus movement, he developed a piece called “Musica Concreta,” which cast a blueprint for a table as the score, carpenters as performers, and their tools as instruments. It worked both as an homage to musique concrete, in which naturally occurring sounds and noises are manipulated to make music, and as a metaphor for altering reality–transforming planks of wood into a table.
Right now Gregorio is most enthusiastic about the forthcoming Degrees of Iconicity, which he believes draws the clearest connections yet among his interests. “The personalities that impacted me the most were artists who faced many aspects of artistic production at the same time–[constructivist Aleksandr] Rodchenko, Moholy-Nagy, Max Bill, the Fluxus activity,” he says. “What interested me in constructivism, concrete art, and later Fluxus and conceptual art, was the possibility of interaction.” On Tuesday at HotHouse he’ll perform pieces from the album, as well as newer ones based on work by Rodchenko, with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm (who’s in his regular trio, along with Biolo) and pianist Jim Baker.
