Gigi Gryce (born George General Grice Jr.; November 28, 1925 – March 14, 1983), later Basheer Qusim, was an American jazz saxophonist, flautist, clarinetist, composer, arranger, and educator.
While his performing career was relatively short, much of his work as a player, composer, and arranger was quite influential and well-recognized during his time. However, Gryce abruptly ended his jazz career in the 1960s. This, in addition to his nature as a very private person, has resulted in very little knowledge of Gryce today. Several of his compositions have been covered extensively ("Minority", "Social Call", "Nica's Tempo") and have become minor jazz standards. Gryce's compositional bent includes harmonic choices similar to those of contemporaries Benny Golson, Tadd Dameron and Horace Silver. Gryce's playing, arranging, and composing are most associated with the classic hard bop era (roughly 1953–1965). He was a well-educated composer and musician, and wrote some classical works as a student at the Boston Conservatory. As a jazz musician and composer he was very much influenced by the work of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.
Early life
George General Gryce Jr. was born in Pensacola, Florida on November 28, 1925.
His family's strong emphasis on music, manners, and discipline had a tremendous effect on him as a child and into his later career. Gryce's parents were of modest means, his mother a seamstress and his father the owner of a small cleaning and pressing service. The family belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and attended services diligently. Especially as the Great Depression began to take its toll on the family's financial welfare, the Gryces did their best to instill the value of discipline and hard work in their children.
Music was very much emphasized in the Gryce household. The family had a piano in the house, which Gigi and his siblings (four older sisters and one younger brother) were encouraged to play. Mostly church music was performed in the Gryce home, while pop and jazz was mostly frowned upon. (Later, however, when Gigi pursued jazz as a career, his mother and older sisters would support him personally and financially.) Many of the Gryce children were encouraged to pursue vocal performance at church, school, and other community; for a time the family even held weekly recitals in their home.
The early thirties saw tragedy and hardship for the Gryce family. In 1931, as the economic crisis of The Great Depression began to take hold, the Gryces were forced to sell their cleaning business. Two years later, Gigi's father, George Sr., died after suffering a heart attack. Rebecca Gryce was forced to raise the children as a single mother, relocating the family in order to rent out the house. Even through this hardship, however, Rebecca continued to motivate her children for success through strict but supportive parenting, encouraging musical development, hard work, discipline, and Christian morals.
Gigi very much applied his family's sense of discipline to his developing passion for music. As a youth Gigi was described as bright but reserved, extremely polite, studious, and formal in nature. It is unclear exactly when Gigi first began learning the clarinet – it is rumored he may have started as early as age 9 or 10, but the first evidence for his pursuit appears later as he entered high school. The under-resourced, and at this time, mostly black Booker T. Washington High School had a series of music teachers through the Federal Music Project; Gigi first studied with Joseph Jessie and later Raymond Shepard. As it was for many, a musical instrument would have been a crippling expense for the Gryces during the Depression; when Gigi and his brother Tommy studied clarinet with Shepard they allegedly borrowed the same clarinet from a friend directly before each lesson. Eventually, Gigi's mother was able to buy him his own Cavalier metal clarinet, with which Gigi became quite successful as a high school student, winning school and state competitions. At school Gigi was also able to study music theory, which he very much enjoyed and continued to explore on the piano at home