Photo Credit: Keith Watling
“We just made it out,” Jack Grassel says, recalling those late winter days of 2020 as COVID-19 closed cities, states and borders. The guitarist and his wife, singer Jill Jensen, were performing at their annual residency in Isla Mujeres, a slightly off-road tourist destination in Mexico, when “people started to get sick,” he continues.
Grassel and Jensen made it home—and then normal life froze. “It was a shock at first. All of a sudden we weren’t playing gigs,” says Grassel, accustomed for the past four decades to performing multiple shows each week. Jensen adds, “I was feeling that we had disappeared—that we were obsolete. What can we do to give us a future?” Then came the invitation to perform for a Cinquo de Mayo celebration on the patio at Thiensville’s Daily Taco and Cantina. It was their first show after 431 days of silence. And it has led to a regular gig.
In recent years Grassel has played his patented triple-neck guitar, a single instrument that can play the role of electric guitar, bass and mandolin as his hand goes freely between instruments. Already a multi-instrumentalist, Grassel has also played banjo, melodica and wooden flute in concert. With nothing but time on his hands during the 12-month shutdown, Grassel learned to play harmonica and purchased a small keyboard. He’s adding them to his portable one-man band as Jensen takes most of the lead vocals.
Jensen is an accomplished jazz singer and Grassel has a long history in Milwaukee jazz as an educator, performer and recording artist. Hal Leonard published several of his instruction manuals. Grassel has released more than 20 albums and evolved as a composer from the initial inspiration of Thelonious Monk to embrace an even wider world. He handled jazz-rock fusion easily enough and eventually drew sustenance from Latin American and Indian music.
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Together, Grassel and Jensen have taken another step. “We’ve modernized our repertoire,” he says, moving away from the Great American Songbook into an eclectic mix of covers—blues, Latin, rock, country “and it all sounds like us,” he adds. Jensen elaborates: “I want songs that tell a story—we try to find fun songs, uplifting but not mainstream. We want people to be surprised. A couple came to see us three times at Daily Taco and told us, ‘We haven’t heard the same song twice.’ We’re not doing crowd pleasers. We’re trying to be the crowd pleaser.”
Nowadays their sets can range from Mose Allison through James Taylor, Sade through “Besame Mucho.” “The lines between genres are really blurring,” Grassel says. Jensen recalls another remark from an audience member. “‘What do you call what you’re doing? I really like it!’” By way of explanation, she explains, “We’re still under the umbrella of jazz but we massage the songs to sound like us.”
Although the owner of Ruben’s Restaurant in Isla Mujeres died from COVID, his staff have reopened the venue and invited Grassel and Jensen to return this winter for their annual residency. They will also perform at the island’s Rosa Sirena restaurant. “Both of those venues wanting us warmed our hearts to be remembered after a gap of a year,” Jensen says.
Meanwhile, Grassel and Jensen will perform, weather permitting, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Thursdays at Daily Taco and Cantina, 105 W. Freistadt Road.
