Biography Henry Grimes

Henry Grimes (born November 3, 1935 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a jazz double bassist, violinist, and poet. In the decade between 2003 and 2013, he has played more than 500 concerts (including many festivals), taught master classes, and given workshops and poetry readings in 29 countries in North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East.

As a youth, Henry obtained his music education at the Mastbaum School and for three years at Juilliard. In the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, he came up in the music playing and touring with Arnett Cobb, Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, “Bullmoose” Jackson, “Little” Willie John, and a number of other great R&B / soul musicians; but drawn to jazz, he went on to play, tour, and record with many great jazz musicians of that era, including Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Sunny Murray, Sonny Rollins, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, and more.

Sadly, a trip to the West Coast to work with Al Jarreau and Jon Hendricks went awry, leaving Henry in Los Angeles at the end of the ‘60’s with a broken bass he couldn’t pay to repair, so he sold it for a small sum and faded away from the music world. Many years passed with nothing heard from him, as he lived in his tiny rented room in an S.R.O. hotel in downtown Los Angeles, working as a manual laborer, custodian, and maintenance man, and writing many volumes of handwritten poetry.

He was discovered there by a Georgia social worker and fan in 2002 and was given a bass by William Parker, and after only a few weeks of ferocious woodshedding, Henry emerged from his room to begin playing concerts around Los Angeles, and shortly afterwards made a triumphant return to New York City in May, ‘03 to play in the Vision Festival.

Since then, often working as a leader, Mr. Grimes has played, toured, and / or recorded with many of today’s music heroes, such as Rashied Ali, Geri Allen, Marshall Allen, Fred Anderson, Marilyn Crispell, Ted Curson, Andrew Cyrille, Bill Dixon, Dave Douglas, Kidd Jordan, Andrew Lamb, Roscoe Mitchell, David Murray, William Parker, Marc Ribot, Wadada Leo Smith, and again, Cecil Taylor. Mr. Grimes has also held recent residencies at the Berklee College of Music, Hamilton College for the Arts, New England Conservatory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, University of Gloucestershire at Cheltenham, and more; he has given a number of workshops and master classes on other major campuses, released several brilliant new recordings, made his professional debut on a second instrument (the violin) at the age of 70 at Lincoln Center, has seen the publication of the first volume of his poetry, “Signs Along the Road,” and has been creating illustrations to accompany his new recordings and publications. He has received many honors in recent years, including four Meet the Composer grants, a grant from the Acadia Foundation, and a grant from WKCR’s “New York Music Alive” series. Mr. Grimes can be heard on nearly 90 recordings on various labels, including Atlantic, Ayler Records, Blue Note, Columbia, Delmark, ESP-Disk, ILK Music, Impulse!, JazzNewYork Productions, Pi Recordings, Porter Records, Prestige, Riverside, and Verve. Henry Grimes now lives and teaches in New York City.

For more information: http://henrygrimes.com, mailto:[email protected] or mailto:[email protected].

Please listen to Henry Grimes and Rashied Ali on “Going to the Ritual” (Porter Records, 2OO8) here: http://www.porterrecords.com/id27.html; and to The Profound Sound Trio (Andrew Cyrille, Paul Dunmall, Henry Grimes as co-leaders) on “Opus de Life” (Porter Records, 2OO9) here: http://www.porterrecords.com/id53.html. You can also watch and hear Henry Grimes making music on several recent videos at http://henrygrimes.com/videos.

For copies of Henry's first published book of writings, "Signs Along the Road," and / or copies of Henry's most recent CD's / DVD's, please see http://www.henrygrimes.com/CDs-books.html.

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