Guillermo Gregorio - Two Trios (2023)

The present record reflects a sort of pivot to his new home, New York, where Gregorio moved in 2015. For the trio that performed at Edgefest—the festival’s 22nd edition in 2018 focused on the Chicago connection—he reached out to close associates from two decades earlier, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Carrie Biolo, neither of whom live there anymore either. That trio was the most productive and enduring group he ever played with, and their nuanced rapport, the fine weave of their sound, the mutual instincts, seem but a continuation without pause of their past work together. Chicago also proved highly receptive to the fruitful convergence of free jazz and twentieth-century European music that allowed him to flourish and become a recognized figure there in the nineties.
Concurrently, by the time of the festival, Gregorio had been performing with Nicholas Jozwiak in different settings around Manhattan and Brooklyn, as they did at Downtown Music Gallery in 2020 just before the world locked down. DMG, Bruce Gallanter’s friendly institution packed into a tiny space, has for decades seen fit not just to sell records but to host weekly concerts of improvised music and Gregorio has played there on many occasions since well before he left Chicago. On this late date, the trio was completed by one of his newest collaborators, Iván Barenboim, like Jozwiak a couple generations younger and like Gregorio a porteño (native of Buenos Aires).

Tracks 1-6
Guillermo Gregorio, clarinet; Carrie Biolo, vibraphone; Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello
Recorded at Edgefest, Ann Arbor, MI, on October 17, 2018.
Tracks 7-11
Guillermo Gregorio, clarinet; Iván Barenboim, contralto clarinet; Nicholas Jozwiak, cello
Recorded at Downtown Music Gallery, New York City, on February 9, 2020.
Cover art by Guillermo Gregorio.
Produced by Jason Weiss for ESP-Disk’.