Kal ZoneBlog

Lunar Glee Club remastered

January 19, 2011

Lunar gig flyer When you think of "Glee Club" today, you might think of a hugely popular TV show. But if you were in Ann Arbor in the mid-1980s, "Glee Club" might have brought to mind a nine-piece band anchored by two electric basses and electric guitar, three percussionists, and three horns — but no singers. The Lunar Glee Club got together in 1984, and different versions of the band played around the Ann Arbor area until the 1990s. The musical style was somewhere in the jazz/funk/fusion/worldbeat/latin/avant-garde range — everyone in the band had been listening to everything from salsa and afrobeat and samba, to Weather Report, to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and many other musical heroes. When I once described the band to the pianist Kirk Lightsey, he shook his head and remarked, "Nine different ways to go out." Which we did. Gleefully.

Remastered 1984 recordings of the band are now up on this website. A few of my favorite tracks are:

The Music section of this website has many more tracks. With Lunar Glee Club 1984 has a summer 1984 studio session that we released as an eponymously-titled cassette, as well as a live radio broadcast of a concert at Depot Town in Ypsilanti, Michigan. More Lunar Glee Club: Live at The Blind Pig has recordings from three different dates at The Blind Pig, a club in downtown Ann Arbor. Yet more Lunar Glee Club: Live at the Ann Arbor Art Fair is a recording of a radio broadcast from the Eclipse Stage in front of the Michigan Union on the U-M campus. Everyone in the band composed original material.

Personnel on these recordings: Dan Ladizinsky and Dan Bilich on electric basses, Sam Clark on electric guitar, Jon Krosnick on drums, Aron Kaufman on congas and percussion, Dave Mason on timbales and percussion, Steve Hiltner on alto sax, Kalle Nemvalts on trumpet, and Paul Vornhagen on tenor sax, alto clarinet, flute.

Copyright © Kalle Nemvalts except as noted. Original content on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. The Creative Commons license does not cover commercial reuse or adaptation, which must be negotiated separately.