Part band/part composers collective, Grant Wallace Band is a collaboration between myself and fellow composer/performers Ben Hjertmann and Luke Gullickson.  Through a uniquely collaborative process, we create and perform music that defies easy categorization, combining threads of new music, jazz, and American vernacular styles.  Since the group’s founding in 2011, we have toured extensively, including featured appearances at Fast Forward Austin, the Resonant Bodies Festival, New Amsterdam Records, the Menil Collection, and the Chicago Cultural Center.  We have collaborated with Ensemble Dal Niente, the Chicago Composers Orchestra, Invisible Anatomy, and the Houston Grand Opera—and have released eight studio albums. For more information, visit grantwallaceband.com.

Discography

Between 2013 and 2015, I collaborated closely with Chicago-based contemporary movement collective dropshift dance to create music and sound design for multiple full-length multimedia/dance pieces. The ability to meet on a weekly basis to develop work in dialogue with dancers, choreographers, and costume/lighting designers created a space of mutual trust in which all of the stakeholders could take risks, make mistakes, and open themselves to the unexpected. The examples below are but a small sampling of the work we created during this time.

Interview on WAMC with ESYO’s Executive Director Rebecca Calos about CHIME and Stand Tall (February, 2022)

From the Two Labyrinths website:

“Art history in particular is often cast as an almost biblical lineage, a long line of begats in which painters descend purely from painters. Just as purely patrilineal Old Testament genealogies leave out mothers and even fathers of the mothers, so these tidy stories leave out all the sources of inspirations that come from other media and other encounters, from poems, dreams, politics, doubts, a childhood experience, a sense of place, leave out the fact that history is made more of crossroads, branchings, and tangles than straight lines. These other sources I called the grandmothers.” — Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Here are two musicians searching for their personal and cultural grandmothers. Chris and Danny Fisher-Lochhead are named for their two parents, but for their Cole-Marr project they chose to adopt a new hyphenation: their grandmothers' family names that had been erased by marriage. This act of re-naming opens the space for re-discovering an erased lineage, and Cole-Marr is also an opportunity for the brothers to make music together outside the stylistic lineages delineated by their educational and professional pedigrees. Danny is an improvising saxophonist by training, Chris a composer and violist. Here they are nothing more or less than two socially conscious musicians engaging with the larger, multi-generational struggle for justice. In this debut single Cole-Marr presents the legendary labor anthem “Joe Hill” and the civil rights hymn “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” both famously sung by the great Paul Robeson.