Jerry Grillo
What does Milwaukee mean to Jerry Grillo? According to his latest recording, “My Hometown Milwaukee,” it’s a city whose “museum has wings and so many things—happening through the year.” Sung with easygoing Tony Bennett swing, “My Hometown Milwaukee” even ventures to predict the Brewers will reach the World Series this year.
Remarkably, Grillo wasn’t born here but arrived, fresh from college, for a teaching job with Milwaukee Public Schools. When he retired a quarter-century ago, the free time finally enabled him to study the craft of jazz singing. He never thought of leaving town. There was always just enough opportunity to entertain at jazz clubs and piano bars and just enough support for a prolific recording career with over half a dozen albums to his credit from the ’90s and ’00s.
“My Hometown Milwaukee” is a rarity in his catalogue—an original song. Grillo credits the owner of the Jazz Estate on the city’s East Side with planting the seed. “‘Someone should write a song about Milwaukee,’ he told me,” Grillo recalls. “He put the bug in my ear, but it took a few things for it to happen: the Bucks, Fiserv Forum—it seemed like a Milwaukee Downtown renaissance. I don’t think there was a time during my lifetime when the city was this buzzing.”
Rather than write songs, Grillo set his sights on interpreting the Great American Songbook, that remarkable pre-1950s repertoire from the pens of Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart. “I’ve always done the standards,” he says, insisting that his influences weren’t the usual suspects of Mel Tormé or Frank Sinatra. “It’s the female singers, actually—Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae. I identified more with them and their interpretations than the male singers of those songs. They are so in tune with the emotional interpretation of the lyrics.”
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“My Hometown Milwaukee” can be found on Spotify and YouTube and has been heard on WMSE. “I’ll never do another album,” Grillo insists.
The new song caught some ears outside the regulars at Milwaukee’s jazz clubs. “I sent the lyrics to the mayor and he came to a show at the Jazz Estate the night I introduced the song,” Grillo recalls. “It was a very kind gesture on his part.” As for Milwaukee, the singer praises the city’s “easy to and fro situation” and a “pizzeria with live jazz twice a week. What other city has that?”
Jerry Grillo performs July 9 at Transfer Pizzeria Café, 101 W. Mitchell St.
