Remembering Steve Grover: Six composers, 18 musicians, and an incredible legacy

Last month, Steve Grover would have turned 64. Like just about everything, that would have given him a lot of joy.

The drummer, composer, and teacher was a Beatles fan – a fan of most music – and just about every Beatles fan loves to think about what they’ll actually be doing “When I’m Sixty-Four.” 

Losing his hair? Check. Grover had an unmistakably bald head. Out ’til quarter to three? Almost definitely. Grover had been gigging since he was 13. No way age would stop him. 

Will we still need him? Oh, most certainly. Even four years since cancer took him,“It still feels like there’s a center of gravity that’s not there anymore,” said Rick Nelson, a composer and guitarist who often worked in bands with Grover. “Steve really was a force in the middle of things.”

That was in evidence again these past couple weeks, as Paul Lichter’s long-running Dimensions in Jazz series collected six composers to re-imagine some of Grover’s bop-style works for jazz orchestra, specifically OURBIGBAND, an 18-piece collective working mostly out of New Hampshire. The works were performed for the first time at the Press Room, in Portsmouth, Feb. 23, and then this past Sunday at SPACE in Portland.

Lichter and pianist/composer Frank Carlberg, who worked on many of Grover’s albums, conceived the idea of “seeing Steve’s concise original music expanded compositionally,” Nelson said. “He wrote these beautiful tunes, but his thing was, ‘I have the head, we play it twice, we do solos, and then we play the head twice. That’s the way the jazz tunes I write are done.’”

Luckily, Frank Mauceri, a saxophonist and composer who teaches at Bowdoin College, has seen to it that Bowdoin is officially archiving all of Grover’s materials – including sketchbooks and drawings – in its Special Collections Library, and he’s made all of the compositions and lead sheets available and freely accessible in Dropbox, which allowed the composers in the project easy access. 

Each composer/arranger took that work in a different direction. At SPACE, Carlberg’s take on “Spherical,” a play on Grover-favorite Thelonius Sphere Monk’s middle name, was a highlight. The bass jumped the beat like an Avalanches record, and the deep trombone that pulled out of the opening bounce was funky and then increasingly desperate, before handing off to an alto sax for a ripping, heart-racing solo. 

It was the kind of show where the musicians clearly wanted to get every bit of the challenging material exactly right. They often clapped for each other, or laughed along at how big someone was going, and watched each other and the various conductors liked their lives depended on it.

Chris Klaxton, OURBIGBAND’s trumpeter and bandleader, went particularly hard on Grover’s Jack Kerouac-inspired “Little Birds,” arranged and conducted by Gideon Forbes, who also played a lead saxophone. It opened with chiming keyboard, esoteric and hissy, and then moved into some truly freaky shit, Klaxton hammering out notes and then seeming to let them dribble out like he couldn’t keep them in, before giving way to a bass-drum feature where they kept rhythm like there was no rhythm whatsoever. 

Nelson’s contribution was a suite he calls “The Space and Time Between the Keys,” which collects and mashes up four songs from Grover’s last album, “Variations.” It featured Priya Carlberg, Frank’s daughter, an undergrad at the New England Conservatory of Music, on vocals, which moved from bludgeoning and forceful to languid and easy, before throwing punches amid the abject, hard, uncomfortable chaos of the piece’s last moments. 

At the finish, players chuckled in the nervous way you do when you don’t know what to do with your emotions, relief mixed with awe. 

“I don’t know that Steve thought of it the way I do,” Nelson said, “but my own artistic vision, which has been coming into focus for me over the past few years, is this sense of the importance of music and the arts as community nurturing events, in this era where everyone is fragmenting into their own little pods.”

For a couple of nights, Grover once again nurtured the hell out of the jazz community. 

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@westgraycreative.com.