Elsewhere Art . . . Robert Graettinger

Our on-going WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . pages allows us to introduce unusual artists or albums, and sometimes another view of a familiar name.

There are some pretty oddball characters covered there, and one is this fellow, Robert Graettinger.

The heading on my piece was The Ghoul of Third Stream because he was a two-metre tall musician/composer described by Art Pepper as looking like “a living skeleton conducting, like a dead man with sunken eyes, a musical zombie”.

Graettinger may have lived like a recluse in his dirty apartment where he slept on a mattress on the floor, but he could write remarkable music.

My article about him focused on his City of Glass piece which was played by Stan Kenton's band.

As I wrote, “It sounds like the soundtrack to a film noir full of nightmare scenes designed by Dali and Hitchcock”.

Graettinger drew his compositions in colour on graph paper and . . .

Well, the whole piece is here if you care to understand why we need to talk about Robert Graettinger.

The art is deliberately jagged and includes some of his graphic compositions but laid over a more traditional score because all those traditional dots on lines were well behind him.

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For other Art by Elsewhere go here.