Grant Clarkson
Grant Clarkson: Biography
Grant Clarkson
Whether with his electric bass or with his upright, Grant Clarkson has been blessed to perform all around the world with incredible musicians and performers.
As a composer, Grant Clarkson has an even more extensive reach and may be one of the more prolific composers in his beautiful California city. The cds released under his own name have sold around the world as have many others wherein he appears as an accompanist. 2009 features a new launch, "Ever So Much Fun", the one-hour music video with compelling original instrumental composition and subtitled literary narrative.
Performing over five hundred different titles in live professional settings and composing & recording over sixty original pieces is part of what constitutes a typical year in the career of Grant Clarkson. The songs performed in the 250 or so lives dates a year are comprised of Grant's original compositions, his colleague's compositions, jazz standards, latin standards, R&B classics, smooth jazz favorites, gospel standards, both contemporary and traditional, show tunes from the periodic pit job, as well as the definitive American blues repertoire.
When teaching privately and in clinics, Clarkson emphasizes listening first, knowing the styles and repertoire, having good technique, including time, intonation, tone, dynamics, and intensity. Central to all these things is theoretical knowledge rooted in reading and at least some piano competence. When performing in ensembles, he strives for perfection in the bass and believes this is a better route to getting positive attention than dominating the ensemble.
When free to compose however, Clarkson demands challenges of himself that go beyond all these things. In 2008, Grant completed his 131st album. Each one has its own theme, instrumentation, and aesthetic. It is from these albums that the tracks for his commercial releases are derived. Grant Clarkson's philosophy as a composer might be stated simply as, 'To thine own self be true'. Never a songwriter in the traditional sense of lyrics and verse/chorus structures, he feels compelled to follow this muse no matter far afield from the nightclub or the DJ his writing takes him, and finds inspiration in the most humble sense from many of the great artists, composers, and performers in the worlds of jazz, classical music, and film.
Grant Clarkson is proud to endorse Hartke speaker enclosures and D'Addario strings.
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