Gordon Grdina - photo by Genevieve Monro
On February 18, 2022, Attaboygirl will release Night’s Quietest Hour by Grdina’s Arabic music ensemble Haram with special guest Marc Ribot; and Oddly Enough, a collection of solo electric guitar pieces composed by Tim Berne
On June 10, Astral Spirits will unveil the second album by the Nomad Trio
with pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Jim Black
“What they share as improvisers is an attunement to radical possibility at any moment, and the expansive technical vocabulary to justify any digression.”
– Nate Chinen WBGO
"Another Edgy, Highly Improvised Masterpiece From Gordon Grdina...the rare jazz guitarist who plays a lot of notes, yet manages to find a way not to waste them."
– delarue, New York Music Daily
The prolific Vancouver-based guitarist, composer, improviser, and master oud player Gordon Grdina has long been tireless in his pursuit of new possibilities and partnerships for his expansive musical imagination. Following the 2021 launch of his own Attaboygirl Records label and a trio of acclaimed new releases, Grdina returns with three more diverse and adventurous new releases for 2022.
February 18, 2022 will see the release of two new albums on Attaboygirl, each of which finds Grdina collaborating with one of modern jazz’s most innovative and creative minds. Night’s Quietest Hour documents the meeting of guitar experimentalist Marc Ribot with Grdina’s Arabic music ensemble Haram, while Oddly Enough debuts a new collection of pieces by saxophonist/composer Tim Berne for solo acoustic and electric guitar with Midi sampler instruments. On June 10, 2022 the Astral Spirits label will release the much anticipated secondouting by Grdina’s explosive Nomad Trio with pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Jim Black.
Grdina founded Haram in 2008 with two purposes in mind: to further evolve his work with traditional Iraqi and Arabic folk music, and to convene several of his favorite Vancouver improvisers into one large ensemble. The follow-up to the ensemble’s 2012 debut, Her Eyes Illuminate, features the addition of legendary guitar wizard Marc Ribot, whose fabled career has included influential work with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant and John Zorn among countless others, as well as his own projects like Ceramic Dog, Los Cubanos Postizos, Spiritual Unity and the Rootless Cosmopolitans. Ribot joined the ensemble in Vancouver for a pair of concerts and a recording session shortly before the onset of the pandemic in early 2020.
“Ribot's been a hero of mine for a long time,” Grdina says. “He added a whole lot of energy and excitement as well as a punk rock aesthetic to these pieces.”
While Night’s Quietest Hour was captured just before the world changed, Oddly Enough came into existence in the midst of the COVID lockdown. Near the outset of the pandemic Tim Berne, the influential and audacious saxophonist/composer who has led such revered ensembles as Bloodcount, Big Satan, Science Friction, Snakeoil and Broken Shadows, casually sent Grdina a new piece he’d recently penned for solo guitar. Grdina sent back a recording and Berne responded with a second piece. That back and forth continued for almost a year before Grdina had accumulated enough material for an album. To expand his sonic palette for these pieces, Grdina designed a new guitar able to simultaneously record Midi data, acoustic and electric.
“The pieces were incredibly challenging yet beautiful and aligned with what I had been exploring in my own writing on my last two solo albums,” Grdina says. “I’m excited by music that is harmonically complex and direct yet free, ambiguous, and open to personal interpretation. Tim’s music is personal and immediately recognizable, yet can be continuously phrased and interpreted differently… Tim has created his own world with its own sense of logic; for me, that is the most inspiring thing an artist can do.”
Finally, June will bring the release of Boiling Point, the second outing for Grdina’s Nomad Trio with Matt Mitchell and Jim Black, two of the most inventive and technically versatile artists in modern jazz. “I can write anything for this band,” Grdina touts. “It's very complex music, rhythmically, harmonically, melodically, and in the way every piece fits together, those guys really can do anything. Since the last album, the group has solidified its unique sound, which is exciting to hear develop on this second record.”
Seeking a new outlet that can keep pace with his ever-expanding roster of ongoing projects and new collaborations, Grdina launched Attaboygirl Records in October 2021. The endeavor was undertaken in collaboration with his partner, photographer Genevieve Monro, who curates the distinctive visual style of the label. The label made its debut with the simultaneous release of the first two entries in its catalogue: Pendulum, Grdina’s third solo album and the second composed for classical guitar and oud; and Klotski, the studio debut of Gordon Grdina’s Square Peg, an exploratory quartet featuring Grdina on guitar and oud, Mat Maneri on viola, Shahzad Ismaily on bass and Moog, and Christian Lillinger on drums.
“I seem to be putting out more music than other labels can handle,” jokes Grdina about the new effort. “The label is a project that Genevieve and I have wanted to take on for a while now. It allows us to release projects when we want and to create a cohesive visual style for these disparate releases.”
Gordon Grdina’s Haram with special guest Marc Ribot – Night’s Quietest Hour
Attaboygirl Records – ABG-3 – Recorded Feb. 29, 2020
Release date February 18, 2022
Gordon Grdina – Oddly Enough
Attaboygirl Records – ABG-4 – Recorded April 29-30, 2021
Release date February 18, 2022
Gordon Grdina’s Nomad Trio – Boiling Point
Astral Spirits – Recorded Jan. 2020
Release date June 10, 2022
