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Jack Grassel lives again, in our spirits. Just listen to the guitar

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Singer Jill Jensen, the longtime spouse of the late guitarist Jack Grassel, remembers him in eloquent and tender words Sunday at a memorial event. Grassel’s three-necked guitar is on display at right. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Some people rise from the dead in their own unique way. That’s what the late guitarist Jack Grassel did Sunday. Several hundred people were there to witness it. So don’t tell me I’m talking through my hat.

Okay, he didn’t get up and walk among us. But the emotional and spiritual weight of the event held Jack aloft as a quivering presence across the room and in the hearts of these people, even more than the quiet resonance of his recorded guitar music that filtered through the hall as the guests filed in for condolences to Grassel’s wife and artistic partner, singer Jill Jensen, and her daughter Beth.

The potency of the event had to do with the mementoes, including photos and videos of Grassel, that put his presence virtually there, right there.

But more than anything what brought Jack to poignant life was the extraordinarily eloquent and moving extended tribute given to him by Jill Jensen.

She resurrected the brilliance of this kind, sweet and gloriously virtuosic and adventurous musician and educator. For all his musical mastery, Grassel retained an ever-boyish way about him. One can vividly imagine, as Jensen related, toddler Jack reaching up to play piano keys each up to the piano keys to copy the music on the radio, and his mother, quickly realizing his musicality, soon buying and placing an accordion in his arms. The instrument virtually swallowed up the small boy, as a delightful photo on display showed. Jack would go on to become a state champion accordionist.

Jill Jensen commented that their stage name was really “too corny.” But it was also charmed, by the way Jack first wooed her, many years ago. It came about this way.  A friend had alerted Jack to her presence and he was immediately smitten. When he first walked up to her, his first words to her were “Hi, I’m Jack and you’re Jill. Let’s go find a hill.”

“What a line,” Jill said to the crowd, still in slightly amazed bemusement after the couple’s 40 years together. Tempering Jack’s bold stroke, you also can picture his slightly shy, crinkly-eyed smile, there in the moment.

Corny or not, Jack and Jill’s duo name was inevitable from that point, and they ultimately lent great musical heft to the nursery rhyme moniker, a musical match of two attractive and gifted people, now assuredly “made in heaven.”

Singer Jill Jensen and guitarist Jack Grassel at their last concert at Villa Terrace 10 days before Grassel’s death. Photo by Stuart Hoffman 

They recorded a handful of albums, the last of which, It’s About the Music, was ambitiously realized and featured nearly 30 musicians, including Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra principal players. Grassel, arguably the region’s most accomplished guitarist, had a long-time working relationship with the orchestra, playing in scores that called for a guitar.

From his obit: “His first paid concert was at age 6. His extraordinary musical abilities, especially on guitar, and perfect pitch, enabled him to forge new paths as a genre-bending multi-instrumentalist, mastering seven instruments. In 1983, as Chairman, he designed the Music Occupations Department at Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) spawning a legion of successful students through his passion, humor and example. He’s known for his 21 CDs (including a duet album with jazz guitar giant Tal Farlow), 70 compositions, 12 Industry awards, and 23 Instruction books. After 20 years and a major illness in 2004, he retired from MATC but never retired from music.”

Yet, let us not dwell too much on nostalgia, or past glories. It’s worth recalling Jill’s tender announcement of his passing:

“My shining star, light of my life, is extinguished. My beloved husband and partner in music and life, Jack Grassel died on August 26, 2026. His closest family were there to say their loving goodbyes. I held him, stroked his hair, and whispered “I love you Jack” as he took his last breath. My wonderful, strong, daughter Beth was beside me.”

His death still pangs our heavy hearts, and walking into the hall with the photographic “biography” of his musical life, and Jack’s triple-necked, self-invented “Super Axe” bass/ guitar/mandolin on silent display was a deep, long breath, a load to absorb. One sat and waited for the owner to arise and start playing the instrument.

There at Four Acres Restaurant in Racine, the beautifully organized event teemed with celebrants of Jack’s 77-year life. It was the largest gathering for a memorial for a musician that I’ve attended, testifying to the man’s importance to this music community. Among the great musicians gracing the event: Kaye Berigan, Hal Miller and Tom McGirr, Jack’s former bandmates in the sui generis Milwaukee avant-jazz band What On Earth. Other musicians present included Warren Weigratz (of Streetlife, the Milwaukee Bucks band, Sweetbottom, Oceans, VIVO), Curt Hanrahan and Steve Lewandowski (of Opus and The Milwaukee Jazz Orchestra), Kim Zick and Connie Grauer (of Mrs. Fun), Sam Belton, Neal Davis, Jerry Grillo, Steve Nelson-Raney, Rick Ollman, Steve Peplin, Carol Trout, John Zaffiro.

Those were just people I saw or spoke with. My apologies to those unmentioned musicians, honored guests and family, as I didn’t go around taking notes.

The theme and spirit of this event is summed up best by the wondrous quote from Wendell Berry’s poem “The Loved Ones,” which adorns the Jack Grassel remembrance cards:

“The loved ones we call the dead depart from us and for a while are absent. And then as if called back by our love, they come near us again. They enter our dreams. We feel they have been near us when we have not thought of them. They are simply here, simply waiting while we are distracted among our obligations. At last it comes to us: They live now in the permanent world. We are the absent ones.”

“We are the absent ones.” Whew.

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I wrote my own memorial article on Jack Grassel for The Shepherd Express and my blog Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak), here: https://kevernacular.com/?p=17486

 

Singer Donna Woodall swings between jazz and pop with aplomb

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All photos courtesy Donna Woodall. 

Though she was born in St. Louis, she’s lived in Milwaukee since 7th grade, so jazz singer Donna Woodall feels deep musical and cultural roots here, considers this home. She grew into a radiant, apple-cheeked purveyor of song who swings like ripe apples on a wind-blown tree. She’s since parachuted far from the tree, a full-fledged artist, perhaps the most active and accomplished female jazz singer working in Milwaukee.

She’ll be honored with a concert at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts on April 21: http://wilson-center.com/calendar/2023/4/21/wisconsin-artists-club-show-series-donna-woodall-group.

“I attribute my specific love of jazz music to my grandfather, who encouraged me to ‘sit and listen’ to swinging divas, and to my mother, Jeanne Woodall, who performed in Milwaukee jazz circles, leaving behind a legacy of song after her passing in 2011,” she explains. Donna diversified her performing skills, studying music, dance, and theater at UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison. Yet, “my mother was my greatest voice teacher — she was a walking encyclopedia of jazz songs and styles.”

Her deepening knowledge, innate musicality and affable personality insinuated her into popular local jazz bands like Eddie Butts, and soon Streetlife, the dynamite jazz-fusion band led by Warren Wiegratz, which played for Milwaukee Bucks crowds for years. So, Woodall can project big, but also charm you with a tender ballad, like “Summertime.” Yet the modal vamp inserted by pianist Theo Merriweather casts a fresh shadow of tension across the languid Gershwin song. This lends strong undercurrents of meaning to a song from a “folk-opera” (Porgy and Bess) about Southern Blacks enduring the early Jim Crow era which, out of context, “Summertime” gauzes over.

Donna Woodall performs recently with keyboardist Theo Merriweather.

A measure of Woodall’s regard among the region’s jazz musicians is that Madison-based Hanah Jon Taylor, arguably the state’s premiere jazz saxophonist, has recently visited Milwaukee twice to perform alongside Woodall, at Caroline’s and St. Kate’s nightclub.

Part of that regard surely has to do with her melted-carmel voice and elastic phrasing, reflecting key influences like Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole and Cassandra Wilson. There’s also Woodall’s expansive repertoire, which includes personalizing atypical-to-jazz pop music songs, including Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing,” The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” (in a jazzy minor-ish key), and even improbably, The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville” — about a romantic relationship in its desperate last hours.

What makes a non-jazz song work for her? “The song should have some connection to my life experiences and great lyrics,” she says. “I was an English teacher for years, so the words and meaning of a song are important!” It should also be pliable enough to “be interpreted numerous ways.” It should also have “universal themes, and a sense of nostalgia to which an audience can relate.”

So, they’re usually songs with a deep history, which all the above do. She’s also had an evocative original song, “Fireworks,” accepted by NPR’s Tiny Desk contest.

For all that, she’s also enabled by a close-knit band which, at the Wilson Center, will include pianist-keyboardist Joe Kral, guitarist Bob Monagle, bassist Ethan Bender (her husband), and drummer Jeno Somali.

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At Woodall’s recent St. Kate hotel nightclub gig, Kral consistently added drive and textural power with a Fender Rhodes keyboard setting, echoing the startling fluency of Herbie Hancock, who made the Fender Rhodes a propulsive and atmospheric alternative to acoustic piano in his Mwandishi and Headhunters funk-fusion bands.

Meanwhile, Taylor again guest-performed with Woodall, deftly blending tenor sax, flute and wind synthesizer, sometimes in the same song. The band geared up a punchy drive to “Route 66,” inspired by Nat King Cole’s version, the singer explained. It proved that Woodall, whom I first encountered performing an enchanting holiday song concert, can kick a little tail when she wants to.

She further deepened her jazz bonafides with a wrenchingly eloquent interpretation of Billie Holiday’s autobiographical “God Bless the Child.” Woodall, who taught middle school English for 30 years, enlightened the crowd by explaining that in her biography Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday said the song inspired by an argument over money between Holiday and her mother when the daughter was a young struggling performer.

Rich relations may give you a crust of bread and such/ you can help yourself, but don’t take too much/ Momma may have, and papa may have/ but God bless the child, God bless the child, whose got his own, whose got his own. 1.

The band dug deep into the song’s tough but tender emotional core. It’s how memories of a hard lifetime get etched in the soul, which bleeds out to anyone who heard Holiday sing it. That evening, we felt Holiday’s blood bleeding from Donna Woodall.

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This article was originally published in shorter form in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/local-music/donna-woodalls-legacy-of-jazz/

1 “God Bless the Child” was written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939. The song won a Grammy Hall of Fame Award, and was chosen as a “song of the century” by The Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.