How it all started:
My first experience with music was at age 12 when I began to learn the violin in the relatively small midwestern town where I grew up, Granite City, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. Music changed everything. Soon, I was completely enthralled - swept away by the brilliant musical minds of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.
I was incredibly fortunate to have a truly wonderful teacher, Linda Beane, to whom I owe my career in music. The incredible lengths to which she went to help her students receive every possible opportunity still amazes me to this day. She drove us miles and miles to auditions and orchestra rehearsals. Bless Linda Beane.
Thanks to Linda's dedication, I played a couple of seasons in the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra, when I was about 14 or 15, under the direction of Leonard Slatkin who is now an internationally renowned conductor and currently the Music Director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. You can view his stellar bio at: http://www.leonardslatkin.com/biography.shtml.
I played a couple of seasons in the SIU Edwardsville, IL. University Orchestra while I was still in high school, and studied privately there. Another great privilege.
Also, while in high school, I got into playing bass guitar and played gigs on the weekends. I played in the high school jazz band during my senior year. After high school, I began to play pop and jazz in nightclubs in, and around St. Louis and, before long, was doing session work as a player, composer and arranger in a few studios around the city.
For a time, while I was living in St. Louis, I played bass in J.D. Parran's band, the phenomenal reed and woodwind player who has lived and worked in New York for many years now. He is very well known as an experimental jazz musician and has played on 50 albums. You can view his stellar bio at: http://www.yallnewyork.org/JD_Parran.html.
St. Louis was chock full of amazingly gifted jazz and pop musicians during the time that I lived there. It still amazes me to think about it.
When I was twenty-five, I moved to New York City and eventual returned to the work with which I was most familiar, writing for commercials while at the same time playing bass in various original pop bands at CBGB, The China Club and elsewhere around town. After a time, live playing gradually faded away and studio work became my central work life. For more than twenty years, I worked as a composer and arranger in New York, creating music for television and radio commercials.
During that time, I had the great privilege of working with some of the best musicians and singers anywhere in a wide range of styles, writing and recording everything from Japanese folk music to full orchestras, and just about everything in between.
Towards the end of my New York career, I wrote and arranged, increasingly and nearly exclusively, for full orchestra, whether live, or with samples in my MIDI studio, or a combination of of the two.
In 2002, my wife and I left the busy music world of the big city for quieter surroundings in Pennsylvania.
Now, after a five-year hiatus, I have returned to music with this personal project of mostly traditional and smooth jazz-based tunes with a refreshing dose of lounge sensibility - and a dash of humor - from my own uniquely colored perspective, Galaxy Lounge.
Take a listen. I hope you like it.
Jon Grindstaff