Grayson Hugh - Grayson Hugh mp3

A Jazzy Rock-and-Blues Homebrew

Ever wish someone would come along who could sing like a fusion of Al Green and Steve Winwood, write music that blended influences as diverse as Yes and Ray Charles, and hammer the keyboards with Emersonian adroitness and Wonderous soul?



  Enter the prodigious Grayson Hugh, grown in Hartford’s back yard soil. Hugh spent a year recording his first album at the Nineteen Studios in Glastonbury, and the result is a sprawling, ambitious product that just drips with talent. 

  

Strange things happen within the circular borders of "Grayson Hugh", an album with happy ties to some of the musical brilliance of the 1960s. The album’s most magical interludes evoke some of the excitement of the early attempts to blend jazz, rock and blues – Winwood’s gutsy Traffic jams and Steve Katz and Bobby Colomby’s earliest dabblings in Blood, Sweat and Tears. The guts of the album, though, are sheer rhythm and blues, as practiced by Charles.



  None of the above, however, fully prepares the listeners for tours de force like "There’s No Such Thing As Those Walls", which matches a growly Charlseian vocal against a Hancocked funk-fusion piano-bass groove and gradually adds overlays of sax, honking in an almost Colemanish counterpoint. Before he has exhausted these possibilities, Hugh abruptly rips the seams out of the composition and erupts into a phosphorescent keyboard solo reminiscent of Keith Emerson’s careening attacks, pumped along by a juggernaut-like cymbals-to-bass rhythm track supplied by drummer Rob Gottfried and bassist Dave Stolz (whose relationship has its roots in the Chris Squire/Bill Bruford tandem of Yes’s middle period – all of which scarcely warns us of Tom Majesky’s whirring guitar solo to come. 

  

Well, let me tell you, it quickens the pulse to think they’re laying this stuff down just an infield fly away, in little old Glastonbury. (For those who worry about the quality of a “local product,” it should be noted that producer Ron Scalise has meticulously recorded, mixed and mastered the music. The sound qualities are far superior to 95 percent of the pop music released by major labels, and the high-grade vinyl is a welcome respite from the snap, crackle and pop garbage that the big labels mass-produce.) 

  
For all the brilliance of the material, "Grayson Hugh" does not necessarily herald great commercial success for its author. Although Hugh occasionally writes attractive pop hooks, as in the country and western-inflected Just When I Was Dancing, he is never content to let the matter rest there. J"ust When I Was Dancing" begins as a fairly sraightforward pop song, but Hugh pushes it into unpredictable regions, and the song expounds at least four separate musical themes – a lot for a casual radio listener to digest in five and one half minutes. 

  

A song like the epic "City Dawn" – which takes off from its initial rhythm-and-blues premise like a trout on a long line, twisting and diving through a daring musical territory – will never appear on the narrow horizons of album-oriented rock radio. Hugh’s music is marvelous, but it may prove too sophisticated for its marketplace – haute cuisine fare in the junk food world of contemporary pop. The adventurous musical palates of the 1960s are harder to find these days. 

  The most commercially accessible tune on the album is "When You’re Young and in the Picture", which Hugh, for better or worse, pegged to Majesky’s Motpwnish guitar lick, giving the cut a gently rocking Isley Brothers feel. (I have heard Hugh perform the piece more effectively as a driving jazz-inspired number, reminiscent of Traffic’s Glad). "Madness of the Heart", an impressionistic jazz ballad is also within the grasp of most pop listeners. 

  

It remains to be seen, however, if the “adult contemporary” patrons of Ambrosia and Eddie Rabbitt are ready for the eerie naturalism and exquisite counterpoint of "In The Hour of the Loon". 

  

Regardless of whether or not the album succeeds, "Grayson Hugh" matches up in excitement, diversity and sophistication to the best rock music recorded in 1981. Hugh and his band have achieved a meritorious level of musicianship, and his music is the kind that yields new delights and insights with each new listening.

  Hartford ought to be proud.

- Colin McEnroe – May 3, 1981, The Hartford Courant