BIO

Jim Grantham is a professional saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist and jazz educator living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. His wide experience of fifty+ years includes concerts, recordings, shows, and ongoing freelance work with many of the major bands and contractors in the San Francisco Bay Area.

His jazz playing includes performances with Bobby McFerrin, George Cables, Eddie Moore, Mark Isham, Ed Kelly, Gaylord Birth, Calvin Keyes, Noel Jewkes, Cal Lewiston, Vince Wallace, Paul Nagle, Art Hirahara, Frank Tusa, and Yancy Taylor among many others. He has recorded with Jessica Williams and Eddie Henderson. His own CD is called Conversations.

He studied music at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is a graduate, Cum Summa Laude, of Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Jim has been teaching music theory and improvisation for over fifty years. He taught harmony, arranging, ear training and ensembles at Berklee College of Music, big band and jazz harmony at San Francisco State and was director of Jazz Studies at Cal State at Hayward.

He started a series of organized workshops and lessons in jazz theory and improvisation in 1977 at the Keystone Korner (noted jazz club in San Francisco—now defunct) that continue to the present time. He was on the Board of Directors for Bay Area Loft Jazz and The San Francisco Jazz Society.

Out of these experiences evolved a unique, comprehensive, and very practical method of learning and mastering the many musical skills involved in improvisation. This approach has gone through several phases to become what is now called the Jazzmaster Workout.

He started the JAMLIST a computer listing of networking musicians) in 1991. He is dedicated to promoting and preserving live improvisational music and would like to network with similar-minded people.