NO COVER 5:00pm Show
Vista Cruiser is the new album from the trio 58 Belvedere featuring guitarist Dean Granros, bassist Pat Keen, and drummer Dave Power. Granros has been a fixture of the upper Midwest improvised music scene since the late 1960s. He has shared the stage with Leo Kottke, the Birds, Willie Dixon, Don Ellis, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Dave Ray, and Tim Sparks. He was featured as a standout at the 2016 Winter Jazz Fest in the New York Times for his performance with Dave King’s Vector Families. Jazz critic Nate Chinen called Granros a “visionary oddball” and went on to say, “he has had a career of mostly regional cult adulation, and in some ways he felt beamed in from another dimension...to my ears it definitely qualified as something new.”
58 Belvedere came together about a decade ago, when Granros, who had moved from the Twin Cities to a farm outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin, met Power, who in turn brought in Keen on bass. Keen had recently returned to the area after studying at the New England Conservatory. The raw edge of Granros' guitar combined with the symbiotic rhythm section of Power and Keen made for an unfiltered take on the idea of the jazz power trio. They began playing across Wisconsin and Minnesota, every performance surrendering to the moment as they worked through Granros' original catalog and group improvisations.
A musical chameleon, Dave Power has been a touring and studio drummer for over a decade having worked with The Staves, Aero Flynn, and Justin Vernon. Pat Keen brings his jazz roots into innovative experimentation across genres, challenging folk narratives and reshaping traditional instrumentation.
Their debut, Rustic Libertines, was released in 2015 and primarily focused on Granros' compositions. Vista Cruiser is the trio’s second offering, recorded at Summer/Winter Studios in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, as the world was slowly and apprehensively crawling out of the pandemic into the hopeful, reassuring, and sometimes blinding spring light. They recorded three hours and 45 minutes of completely improvised instrumental material, using guitar, upright bass, drums, modular synthesizer, and drum machine, with producer/engineer Dex Wolfe at the helm.
Over the course of the next year, Wolfe, Keen, and Power collaborated for several post-production sessions, whittling down, chopping up, and copying and pasting to fashion a record out of the session, a very different approach than their first effort, resulting in a beautiful new album, with one foot in the tradition, the other in the future.
