AftEarth by Ryan Meagher

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it sounds astonishing. Though guitarist/composer Ryan Meagher started planting the seeds for a collaboration with visual artist Tina Granzo in the months before the pandemic, it’s difficult not to experience their multimedia project AftEarth as a slyly probing meditation on apocalyptic times. A multifaceted release on Atroefy Records that includes the stand-alone music via download, streaming, and CD, a 62-page book with a companion CD, and video series, AftEarth offers a sharply observed scenic tour through the end times rendered in sadness and anger, bemusement and dry wit.

A prime mover on the Oregon jazz scene as a player, composer, and educator, Meagher (pronounced Marr) didn’t just find an artist to illustrate his spacious quartet soundscapes. In Granzo he enlisted a fellow connoisseur of unsettling tableaux, with each piece emerging from an elaborate mutual exchange of images and musical themes. Bringing together a cadre of luminaries from Portland’s thriving jazz scene, Meagher’s group features tenor and soprano saxophonist Tim Willcox, bassist Andrew Jones, and drummer Charlie Doggett, with the project’s recording engineer Clay Giberson contributing piano and keyboard on several tracks.

Recently appointed artistic director of the creatively fecund Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, Meagher isn’t a newcomer to interdisciplinary projects. In graduate school at the University of Nevada, Reno, he teamed up with a painter and performance artists for an evening of live visual audio improvisation, “but I’ve never done a long-form project like AftEarth,” he says. The process started with several discussions about themes “and then Tina drew a ‘seed’ drawing for each one,” he explains. “I wrote music for each theme/seed, and then she drew more art for each tune after hearing the music.”

The music provides a compelling journey on its own, with Meagher displaying a masterly ear for sustaining drama and tension across extended spaces. Rather than following a narrative arc, AftEarth unfolds as a series of scenarios that evoke stark and forbidding environments and occasional glimpses of valleys, mesas, and mountains that feel disquietingly uncanny. Some pieces, like “End of the Rainbow,” seem to search and wander, as Willcox’s curious soprano investigates strange and buzzy terrain with Meagher’s affable guitar and Giberson’s color-wash keyboards. But darker moods always seem to loom into view. “The American Scream” slowly builds to a fuzzy, crunching guitar passage, while “Irreverence Between Us” unfolds as a stubbornly stuck dialogue between Meagher and Willcox’s tenor sax.

Adding Granzo’s pen and ink images into the mix doesn’t just provide insight into the feedback loop of inspiration between the artists. It turns the music into a soundtrack for her intricately rendered images as the quartet’s harmonic and textural spaciousness amplifies scenes conspicuously devoid of people, even when there’s bountiful evidence of human habitation. The imagery hints at the fraught, depopulated surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico, but as if glimpsed decades or perhaps centuries in the future.

“The lack of people in her prior work is one thing that inspired this,” Meagher says. “Tina says she’s terrible at drawing people, which is both serious and half-joking. Seeing all these landscapes without people and how humans impact the environment can be depressing, but we tried not to take it too seriously.”

One sign of their wry sense of humor is the punning, portmanteau title, which suggests both a post-human planet, after Earth, and the rear of a ship, aft, “as in the rear part of earth, what we’ve got left,” Meagher says.

In many ways, jazz and its environs has long served as a muse for Granzo, an art school grad who spends her days working as a web designer. Partnered with guitarist Neil Mattson, another essential Portland jazz musician, concert producer, and writer with whom Meagher founded the Montavilla Jazz Festival, she often found herself sitting at a bar or table at a club where he was performing, “a low light situation,” she says.

“I’d see something, a lamp, a carafe, or a bottle and think wouldn’t it be fun if that was a house or a mountain with a tunnel. I call them ‘Sketchy Spaces,’ kind of making fun of myself. It’s my drawing. I can do whatever I want, eight different sources of perspective or light from multiple sources. Little by little people started saying you should have a show.”

When a sommelier at a neighborhood wine bar, Vino Veritas, saw her drawing one night about five years ago he suggested that she put together a show of her work. Realizing she had created more than 80 Sketchy Space pieces, Granzo figured it might be fun to share them, which is where Meagher got a good look at her work.

“I loved it and immediately suggested we talk about a way to work together,” he says. “Her art work directly influenced how I was going to compose a piece. And I tried to compose for the players in general making sure Tim gets to stretch out, and creating space for Andrew, who’s great at using effects.”

Born August 18, 1981 in San Jose, Ryan Meagher grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley, though his passion ran toward baseball rather than personal computers. Smitten by Nirvana as a young teen, he started playing guitar and found his way to Rush, which stoked his interest in more complicated music. “I was really influenced by blues, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Black American music,” he says. “I got into jazz because there was this deep emotional connection to the Black American lineage. Jazz had it all, soul and the challenge of getting better on your instrument.”

At Santa Teresa High School he found an accomplished jazz band director in Gus Kambeitz, and often sought out the late great pianist Smith Dobson at Garden City, an essential South Bay jazz spot for decades. A scholarship to San Diego State brought him into contact with veteran trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos, and Meagher started playing gigs around the city. He made the move to New York City after he graduated and released his first album, 2004’s Sun Resounding, which raised his profile as a composer and improviser.

His 2009 follow-up, Atroefy on Fresh Sound New Talent Records, featured a bevy of rising stars, including altoist Loren Stillman and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza, confirming his reputation as an impressive new voice. He recorded his third album, the 2012 quintet project Tone with Sperrazza and trumpeter Shane Endsley, while back in New York between semesters at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he was earning a master’s degree in music. After completing the degree Meagher relocated to Portland in 2012, quickly establishing himself as a catalyst in an already energized creative music community.

The director of jazz programs at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington, he also teaches guitar at Mount Hood Community College and the University of Portland. The co-founder and programming director of the Montavilla Jazz Festival, Meagher held several leadership roles in the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble before his recent artistic director appointment, including director of the in-house label PJCE Records (which released four of his albums before AftEarth). A sought-after collaborator, he’s contributed to albums by saxophonist Bryan Smith and pianist Andrew Durkin, while performing with Mostly Other People Do The Killing, vocalist Rebecca Kilgore, and masters such as Randy Brecker, Cuong Vu, and David Friesen. Always eager for a new challenge, he was featured in the house band for an acclaimed Portland Center Stage production of the Broadway tour of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights.

Somehow he distills many of these far-flung experiences in the bleak but somehow welcoming world of AftEarth. It might be the end of the world, but everyone’s invited. “I try to write music my mentors and heroes would appreciate, but also my mom, who doesn’t know a whole lot about jazz,” Meagher says. “I try to make music to make you feel as well as think. I’ve got those ’90s grunge rock roots and some of that’s in here. Play loud as hell with anger at 16, that’s part of my experience. And so is playing pretty over ballads.”

Ryan Meagher (pronounced Marr) is a jazz guitarist and composer who grew up in San Jose, California. Perhaps best-known for his compositional acumen. Meagher has nine albums under his own direction, and is in-demand as a sideman in the Pacific Northwest. Since moving to Portland, OR in 2012, he has become a fixture on the creative music scene as an artist, educator, and arts administrator.

ryanmeagher.com