The Grosz Clinic

A quick master class on Philly's hot jazz giant Marty Grosz.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Dec 8, 2010

Gerd Jordan

BRING THE HEAT: Marty Grosz doesn't care much for "egghead" jazz. He wants you to dance.

[ jazz ]

Jazz has more than a few legends whose credits are shrouded by personal hubris, foible and sadness. Marty Grosz — scholar, crooner, virtuoso of the chordal acoustic guitar — is a different story. So much of his career has been riddled with joy. His brand of happy dancing hot jazz has long run in opposition to popular artists "coming out of jazz school playing egghead music that most people don't relate to and is not much fun to hear," as he puts it.

"I don't want to listen to college kids turning themselves inside-out playing 45-minute versions of 'All the Things You Are' with endless saxophone solos," laughed Grosz on the phone from Munich last week during a brief tour of his birthplace. "It's tedious, man, bad form."

Grosz moved to Philly several years ago to be close to his son who helped take care of Grosz' wife, who was felled by Alzheimer's. Though steady jazz gigs in the States are rarer than he'd like (hence the showcases abroad), Grosz is cheerfully ready for his third act. "I'm old enough that this is more like a fifth act, maybe."

The first few acts weren't bad.

Grosz moved around a bit since his father, George Grosz — the German Expressionist icon — brought his family to the States in 1933. The guitarist doesn't include the legendary painter at the top of his bio, nor does he hide the fact. "My father was immensely proud and supportive, but he understood my reasons," says Grosz. "What if his father had been Stravinsky?"

Though he recorded first in the 1950s with New Orleans veterans like Pops Foster, Grosz went mostly unheralded until playing with Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern in Soprano Summit, '75-'79. Sessions with players like Vince Giordano, whose Nighthawks are in HBO's Boardwalk Empire, and other re-discoveries of the "hot" idiom, have made him an even more valued commodity. Last year saw the release of Marty Grosz and Hot Winds: The Classic Sessions, while 2008 witnessed Acoustic Heat, duets with Django-ologist Mike Peters. Another CD's worth of material of the non-piano pop music of James P. Johnson, is due on Arbors records in 2011, to add to his 20-plus effusive recordings.

"If you told Louis Armstrong or Jack Teagarden in 1935 that they'd be hired to play a jazz concert, they'd look at you like you were nuts," laughs Grosz. "They played for dancing — get the beat going, play the tune and improvise." That's the spirit of his collaborations with fellow fluttering guitarist Barry Wahrhaftig's Hot Club of Philadelphia.

"Jazz came into prominence as bluegrass did — a folk music, if you will, that was often played wrong but with a sense of fun. Bluegrass makes people feel good and is still going on as such with people plucking and strumming. Jazz doesn't do that anymore. It should."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

:The Hot Club of Philadelphia CD release party with Marty Grosz, Fri., Dec. 10, 8 p.m., $15-$20, The Mermaid Inn, 7673 Winston Road, Chestnut Hill, 215-247-9797, themermaidinn.net.

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