Guillermo Gregorio - Biography
Guillermo Gregorio is a fascinating polymath, a composer, author and multi-instrumentalist with a remarkable broad career and an approach to sound that reconsiders convention in a constant flow of dynamicism and willful inventiveness. Born in 1941 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Gregorio spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in splendid isolation, working in anonymity with his peers to seed Argentine conceptualism with the European avant garde; drawing his influence from Fluxus, the geometric abstractions of Constructivism, and the formalist underpinnings and visual cues of architecture — Gregorio has advanced training as an architect and has extensively worked and taught in the field of industrial design — he devised a novel approach to music that allows for a fluid, evolving framework that supports a rich variety of musical forms, aural expressions, and radical performance idioms. Gregorio has an amazing ability to build conceptual articulations between both graphic notion and conventional scores, and bop-savvy yet post-jazz improvisation and aggressively experimental composition. Meanwhile, his open and accommodating interaction with musicians makes him keenly effective as a group leader, ensemble director, and collaborative partner. A peripatetic artist, Gregorio landed in the US in the 1980s, and his subsequent work within the fertile Chicago music scene has considerably elevated his international profile, ensuring that he has been belatedly recognized as one of the preeminent minds of 20th century composition, trans-media intermingling and improvisational stagecraft.
Gregorio’s early work offers a vivid insight into the ferment that existed in the radical circles of Buenos Aires in the 1960s, when assertive artistic statements were as bold and audacious and as dangerous as assertive political statements. An essential collection, Otra Music: Tape Music, Fluxus & Free Improvisation in Buenos Aires, 1963-70 (2000 Atavistic) was belatedly issued as part of musicologist John Corbett’s crucial “Unheard Music” series. It reveals a skill with electronics, while setting the table for much of Gregorio’s later efforts for alto saxophone and clarinet. Gregorio spent much of his career bouncing between Buenos Aires, Vienna and Los Angeles, before beginning a prolific relationship with the esteemed HatArt label. His initial releases from the 1990s are often challenging, but uniformly engaging: Approximately (1995 HatArt/HatOlogy); Ellipsis (1997 HatArt/HatOlogy); Red Cube(d) (1999 HatArt/HatOlogy); Degrees of Iconicity (2000 HatArt); Factura (2002 HatArt). The more recent Coplanar (2005 New World Records) is an especially gripping example of Gregorios deft fusion of robust concept and interpretive dexterity.
That dexterity is always audible in Gregorio’s work, whether he’s playing reeds himself, or enticing performances from others. His extensive collaborative efforts merit all sorts of pleasurable scrutiny, starting with several albums supporting Franz Koglmann: Orte der Geometrie (1988 HatArt); The Use of Memory (1989 HatArt); and Cantos I-IV (1992 HatArt). Some additional highlights include: Boxhead Ensemble Two Brothers (2001 Atavistic); Josh Abrams/Axel Doener Quartet Cipher (2003 Delmark); Scott Fields Ensemble Christangelfox (2004 482 Music); The Fred Lonberg-Quartet Bridges Freeze Before Roads (2006 Long Box Recordings). Gregorio has also interpreted scores by key 20th century composers, and his performances on Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1998 HatArt) and Material (2004 HatArt) are inspired. Gregorio continues to acknowledge his Buenos Aires origins; in 2001 he formed the Madi Ensemble of Chicago, which explores new and historic scores, with a clear eye and discerning ear focused on the trends that make the avant-garde compelling in both hemispheres. Guillermo Gregorio currently teaches Art History and Art Appreciation courses at Purdue University in Indiana, and his exquisite graphic scores can be found in the permanent collection of the Centre de Art Geometrique in Paris.
