By Andrea Canter, Jazz Police - June 2007

“Dissolving the individual ‘I’ in the dynamic liquid
of the collective ‘us,’ a new entity is unleashed, capable
of seeking ever-higher levels of expressions unavailable to the isolated
player. You know… a band.” –Dean Magraw

One of the most prolific and popular musicians based in the Twin Cities,
guitarist Dean Magraw is also one of the most eclectic, with a thirty-year
career spanning genres and cultures, from blues to classical to folk
and jazz, from Japanese and Indian to Celtic and middle American. His
new release, Unseen Rain, reflects his many influences, but perhaps none
more strongly than his allegience to John Coltrane.

On hearing Unseen Rain, fans of Dean Magraw’s ethereal lines,
wandering melodies and global influences will not be disappointed. Other
than two covers (John Coltrane’s “Mr. Syms” and Harold
Arlen’s “Out of This World”), the program is entirely
originals from Magraw and one co-written with bassist Jim Anton (“Plum
Blossom”). Coltrane seems to penetrate several tracks, however;
Magraw’s cryptic liner notes indicate “a respectful nod to
the John Coltrane arrangement” of “Out of This World,” as
well as a Coltrane salute on the original “Three Voices.” “Bird
in the House” suggests the bop master’s influence, while
there are threads of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern roots here and
there.

Of the 8 originals, the opening title track stands out as a 21st century
hymn with Jim’s deep, solemn bass notes, JT Bates’ soft brushes
on drums and Dean’s stately guitar, the latter conjuring a horn
in a backwoods church service. About half way along, Anton picks up the
pace with more quirky bass phrases in counterpoint to Magraw; the drums
become more assertive. It’s a showcase for Magraw’s ability
to make minor alterations that create significant impact in the guitar
passage—a longer or shorter sustain, more or less whine. Dean describes “Keep
the Faith” as “a phoenix rising from the ashes of death and
grief,” confirming this image with a dark melodic line from over
some equally dark basslines and hollow thunks from JT. Magraw picks up
the pace with some elastic fingerwork, supported by increasing percussion
activity while Anton takes off with his own dark thoughts.

“Isabella” is a brighter composition, with funky percussion
joined by equally funky strings in with an upbeat, forward motion. The
form is repetitive with a few breaks. Anton takes a deep burbling solo
placated by Dean’s chords and JT’s ever-present pulse. As
Magraw comes back with thick combinations of chords and plucked phrases,
there’s a joyous urge to hit the dance floor. There’s a similar
joyous groove on “Eva Arriving,” Magraw providing some keyboard-like
zings over the heavy beats of drum and bass. JT particularly offers a
wide range of support, throwing in a little bit of everything possible
from the drumkit. “Bird in the House” also offers a far-flung
menagerie of sound, at times making it difficult to distinguish what’s
created by strings versus percussion. On his liner notes, Dean asks “Is
it Charlie Parker swinging post mortem, or is it the young starling patiently
herded to the open glass doorway?” Perhaps it is Parker’s
ghost pushing the trio through several themes, generally snakey and sinister.
If not entirely in sync with the notes, the threesome seem to swing in
unison. When JT takes his solo, one is reminded that the audio is only
half the show with this drummer—he is always fun to watch.

The jointly penned “Plum Blossom” (by Magraw and Anton)
similarly prompts a desire for the visual, starting out like a weird
warning signal, a whine in two octaves. Dean aptly describes this track
as a “sinuous melody discovered by Jim Anton, with Dean acting
as grateful assistant.” Their conversation heats up, venturing
off into wild spaces of sound and harmony. More earthly is Magraw’s “These
Voices,” with what sounds like acoustic guitar, suggesting Joe
Pass has stopped by the studio. Notes Dean, “We can still feel
the sounds of the Great masters filtering through the light of their
discoveries and the darkness of their struggles, Viva John Coltrane!” Anton
also emotes cello-like acoustic tones, even conjuring a horn as the trio
moves through this lovely ballad with hints of Spain and lyrical shimmer. “Mali” carries
a more global, world folk music feel, featuring a duet of whiney bass
and clacky drumset.

The two covers tip the scales toward Coltrane more overtly. “Mr.
Syms” (Dean notes that “some say Coltrane wrote this blues
for his barber”) brings back a more acoustic guitar sound, but
with lots of bubble and pop thanks to Anton. Magraw nevertheless creates
a wide array of sounds as does Anton, and again I wish I had the visual
perspective on this track. Anton gives this arrangement its character
as much as Magraw and Bates give it its texture. The closing track is
an elongated (11+ minutes) arrangement of the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer
classic, “Out of This World,” which Magraw notes is “interpreted
with a respectful nod to the John Coltrane arrangement as well as some
events of our accidental design.” Over the ostinato bass, the whining
electronic melody sings with horn-like tone, giving it a Middle Eastern
vibe—truly out of this world. After about five minutes, the trio
shifts orbit, entering a universe of high-pitched whistles, squeals,
and gurgles. It’s a fitting finale to a program exposing the sonic
possibilities of guitar, bass and drum in the hands of such creative
artists as Magraw, Anton and Bates.

The Musicians

Starting out on bugle, St. Paul native Dean Magraw studied classical
guitar at the University of Minnesota and Berklee College of Music in
Boston. For many years, Magraw was half of a popular partnership with
mandolin virtuoso Peter Ostroushko. Straddling jazz, folk, bluegrass
and more, he has performed with and/or recorded with Ruth McKenzie, Claudia
Schmidt and Greg Brown, among others; he has explored his Celtic heritage
performing with Celtic accordionist John Williams. Other collaborations
include Japanese shamisen prodigy Nitta Masahiro, classical violinist
Nigel Kennedy, South Indian vocalist and vina virtuoso Nirmala Rajasheker,
songstress and storyteller Ruth MacKenzie, Irish supergroup Altan, Garrison
Keillor and Prairie Home Companion, and jazz bassist Anthony Cox. Magraw’s
first solo recording, Broken Silence, won the NAIRD 1994 Best Acoustic
Instrumental Album of the Year. Dean released Seventh One in 1998, the
solo album Heavy Meadow in 2004, Raven with John Williams in 2006; and
appears on Claudia Schmidt’s 2006 release, Live at the Dakota with
his quintet. Of Dean Magraw, Steve Tibbetts wrote, “It’s guitar,
but it’s so liquid, lyrical and effortless that it’s like listening to
a dancer.”

Dean’s long-time collaborator, bassist Jim Anton has a similarly
eclectic resume, including recording and touring with Steve Tibbetts,
Bradley Joseph, Jesse Johnson , Will Hale, Willie Wisely, Choying Drolma,
Peter Ostroushko, Mandy Moore, John Gorka, Joey McIntyre, Delta Goodrem,
Glen Phillips, and Jonny Lang. Locally he has also performed with Doctor
Mambo’s Combo, Greazy Meal and Chris Cunningham’s trio.

Drummer JT Bates is another fixture on the Twin Cities music scene,
an agile percussionist who is equally at home in rock, mainstream jazz
and experimental music settings. An early member of the Motion Poets,
his regular gigs these days include Fat Kid Wednesdays, Slow Skate and
the Kelly Rossum Quartet; he’s hosted a weekly jazz night at the
Clown Lounge and anchors a number of ensembles at the Minnesota Sur Seine
Festival.

by Pamela Espeland · MinnPost.com · November 14, 2008

How many Dean Magraws are there, anyway? There’s Dean Magraw the jazz cat. Dean Magraw the folkie. The rock star. Front-porch bluegrass picker. Bluesman. Celtic bard. World music man.

As MPR’s Euan Kerr has said, “Dean plays everything.”

“I view the so-called different styles of music as one big family of sound,” Magraw says. “Those little bins in the record store, the categories, they don’t do justice to the similarities between so-called different styles. … I don’t see them as separate, at war, superior, inferior, but as part of a continuum of us humans putting vibrations into the air, sharing that kind of healing energy, joy, safe and healthy expression of every emotion available.”

Dean Magraw, philosopher-shaman.

This weekend, Nov. 14-15, he brings his organ trio to the Artists’ Quarter for two nights of musical exploration. The trio is Magraw on guitar, Mikkel Romstad on Hammond B-3, and Kenny Horst on drums. It was formed during the Republican National Convention in September, when AQ owner Horst asked Magraw to play a night at his club and the other members of Magraw’s regular trio (bassist Jim Anton and drummer J.T. Bates) were unavailable.

Guitar and B-3 are a classic jazz pairing (John Scofield/Larry Goldings, Kenny Burrell/Jimmy Smith, Paul Bollenback/Joey DeFrancesco), and this isn’t the first time Magraw has explored it. In the mid-1980s, he was part of a foursome called Organ Grinder with Romstad, Horst, and Gary Berg on saxophones.

From bugle to guitar

Born in Minneapolis, Magraw grew up in St. Paul and began his music studies on bugle. He switched to trumpet, then discovered the guitar at age 13. “I went to a friend’s house to coax him to come outside. He was practicing guitar and said, ‘You gotta try this.’ He taught me the opening riff to ’19th Nervous Breakdown.’ From that moment, I was hooked.”

Magraw studied at the University of Minnesota and Berklee College of Music in Boston. He spent five years in Beantown, playing professionally and teaching. It never felt like home, so he returned to St. Paul and has lived here ever since, making a life of music – playing, composing, arranging, producing – and raising a family.

Magraw’s music is impossible to pigeonhole. For 15 years, he was half of a duo with mandolinist Peter Ostroushko. He has collaborated with Masahiro Nitta, who plays the traditional Japanese shamisen (three-stringed instrument); with Nigel Kennedy, Britain’s bad boy of the classical violin; with Nirmala Rajasekar, South Indian vocalist and player of the vina (a south Indian stringed instrument); with the singers Ruth MacKenzie and Claudia Schmidt; with the Irish supergroup Altan.

As a jazz cat, he leads his own trio and a quintet, performs with Red Planet and Shovel, and recently started a still unnamed trio with drummer and percussionist Jay Epstein and saxophonist Brandon Wozniak.

He plays and records with the rock’n'reel punk-folk group Boiled in Lead. He has released an album, “Raven” (2006), with Celtic multiinstrumentalist John Williams, and has recorded another with Hungarian guitarist Sándor Szabó that he hopes will be out soon. “It’s a cool improvisational recording,” Magraw says. “Sounds kind of like Bartók to me.”

‘Unmistakably Dean’

If you’re not familiar with Magraw, you may wonder how one person can play so many different kinds of music without being superficial. If you’ve seen him live or heard his recordings, you know that’s not a problem. The sounds that come from his guitar (most often a white Stratocaster; at the AQ, he’ll play a big Gibson L-5) are dreamy and down-to-earth, spacious and tight, hushed and wailing, stately and playful — sometimes all on the same night, or within the same tune.

After seeing Magraw at the Cedar in March, Joe Lang wrote: “The thing about Magraw is that he is capable of sitting in with most players, and adapting rather than assimilating to the session — which means that Magraw can fit in with almost anyone, but it’s always unmistakably Dean.”

As I write this, I’m listening to two recent Dean Magraw CDs: “Foxfire” (2008), a collection of solo guitar compositions, and “Unseen Rain” (2007), recorded with his regular trio. Two very different albums, both very Dean.

“Foxfire” includes a shimmering Carnatic reading of John Coltrane’s “After the Rain.” (Carnatic music is the classical music of southern India.) See and hear him play it here. “Unseen Rain” includes a jazzy version of Coltrane’s “Mr. Syms.”

Magraw loves Coltrane.

“In high school I did a report on jazz and started to collect records from friends. One had an aunt who had [Coltrane's] ‘A Love Supreme.’ I was completely taken in by it. The atmosphere and the mood were all-engulfing. I was completely in that world as soon as those sounds started.”

What to expect at the AQ shows

At the AQ, we’ll probably hear “Mr. Syms” and more originals and arrangements by Coltrane. Magraw also promises “some of the traditional repertoire of the organ trio. Hopefully ‘Back at the Chicken Shack,’ the Jimmy Smith classic.”

On stage, he’s enormously entertaining. Experimental guitarist Steve Tibbetts has said that listening to Magraw’s music is “like listening to a dancer.” Watching him perform, it’s clear that he’s doing exactly what he wants to do. He exudes antic joy. When something makes him happy, and many things do, he punches the air and shouts “Wooooo!” His shirts are famously wild. Lately he favors a blood-red button-up.

If the Hammond B-3 isn’t your thing, you can catch Magraw at the Kitty Cat Klub Dec. 16 with his new unnamed trio. Or before then on Dec. 13 at the Cedar with John Williams. “What I’m doing in concert and the studio changes so often there’s no regularity, no abiding thread,” he says. “But I tend to have musical colleagues who are very open-minded.”

by Tad Simons, April 13, 2007

The great and sometimes maddening thing about guitar magician Dean Magraw is that you never know quite what you’re going to get. He can be an inspired acoustic jazz picker, as he was on his debut album, Broken Silence. He can team up with another musician and provide little more than tasteful backup, which he did on his latest release, Raven, with accordionist John Williams. Or, as he displayed without a doubt last night at the Artists’ Quarter during the CD-release party for his latest venture, Unseen Rain, Magraw can make an electric guitar do anything he wants—including make it sound like a dolphin.

Dressed plainly in a mottled red bowling shirt and baggy brown pants, Magraw took the stage with Fat Kid Wednesdays drummer JT Bates and bassist Jim Anton, and promptly began playing some of the most technically accomplished, musically adventurous jazz I’ve heard in quite some time. What Magraw, Bates, and Anton have created is an experimental jazz trio that’s both loose and tight at the same time, with enough discipline to keep the music structured, but plenty of freedom to roam out to the otherworldly edges of the sonic universe and back. Bates is a freakishly talented drummer who, like Magraw, gets an astonishing variety of noises out of a standard drum kit. And bassist Anton always seems to have the perfect answer for Magraw’s playful high-jinks on guitar.

Most of the tunes on Unseen Rain are original compositions. They range in character from the woozy, restrained textures of the title track to “Isabella,”a smooth-jazz tune roughed up just enough to make it interesting, all the way to a truly bizarre thing called “Plum Blossom,” which features Magraw on a Fender Stratocaster playing a kind of weird, ghostly electronic slide that ends up sounding like whales, dolphins, and several other creatures that aren’t necessarily of this earth. In between, there are also several trans-cultural gems, such as “Keep the Faith,” a composition that fuses Indian and Middle Eastern tonalities with Western jazz and rock in a way that makes you feel as if world peace may actually be possible, as long as no one opens their mouth to interrupt the music.

This is all done in the playful, even traditional, spirit of jazz exploration. To emphasize this fact, Magraw and crew threw in a few numbers by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and John McLaughlin, each of which they stretched and made their own. It’s my sincere hope that Unseen Rain isn’t the only disk Magraw, Bates, and Anton decide to record; there’s too much sonic territory still left for these guys to explore.