Acoustic Conversations

Bob and Patti first played together in 1995 in a big band at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium doing arrangements of Grateful Dead music. That one performance made them know they had connected. They went on to separate projects, but their musical paths crossed again in the first months of Covid, which sent both looking for a musical relationship amid the isolation of the pandemic.

 

Patti shared a CD of ragas that she had just recorded. Within a week of that first phone call, they were donning masks and getting together to play a panoply of music, ranging from Bob’s original songs to Indian ragas to jazz standards.  As the pandemic wound down, they began to work in public. Acoustic Conversations is their first recording, one that highlights their prowess as improvisors.  Most of the CD was recorded in one session with no overdubs.  What you have here is what they played.

 

Drawing from their influences in jazz, classical, and free improvisation, Bralove and Weiss have created a tapestry of music that is as natural to them as a conversation, each one taking turns commenting on the subject at hand: sometimes in agreement, sometimes in opposition, but always articulate and in focus.  

 

Bob Bralove attended Hampshire College, then came to San Francisco, where he earned a Masters in Composition at SF State University.  He went to work as a synthesizer programmer and all-around technical wizard especially in the realm of MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface), first for Stevie Wonder and then for the Grateful Dead.  He performed with the latter during various “drums and space” sequences, and edited their music into the spectacular album Infrared Roses.  He also co-wrote such songs as “Picasso Moon.”  Later he formed the duo “Dose Hermanos” with former G.D. keyboard player Tom Constanten.  They have released several albums.

 

Patti Weiss started playing violin at six years old, and by fourteen she was venturing from classical to bluegrass and country.  She began to explore jazz at sixteen and attended Berklee College of Music in Boston.  International travel followed, from Italy and Greece through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan with a group of Swiss artists, and then to India, where she met an American pianist, Anna Toso. They studied with Master Joi Srivastava, a famous Indian violinist.  Anna returned home, and Patti went off to Thailand, where she met a Thai bluegrass band and played with them for two months.

 

Over the next years, she recorded three albums – Surrounded by Angels (1996) with Curtis Ohlson (Ray Charles’ bassist), Jazz with Patti Weiss (1999), and Train Ride Home (2019) with Anna Toso and Frank Zappa’s bassist Scott Thunes.

 

She returned to the U.S. and earned a degree in South Asian Languages at UC Berkeley. She is fluent in Hindi, Urdu, French and Spanish and some Italian. After this, she lived in Paris for a year, where she met and studied with jazz violinists Jean Luc Ponty and Didier Lockwood and played and recorded with Memphis Slim. Once home, she established her own group with Curtis on bass, Peter Horvath on piano, and Norbert Stachel (Prince, Diana Ross) on reeds.

 

In succeeding years, she was a guest of the Gipsy Kings on three North American tours, spent a year touring with Josh Groban, four years with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and a tour with Smokey Robinson. She performed and composed music for five feature films, including The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Guinevere, Kazaam, and China Lake (with Norbert Stachel).

 

After the Paris trip, she returned home and at twenty-nine began graduate school, earning a doctorate in neuropsychology. She lives in San Francisco and works as a neuropsychologist both in private practice and as a staff member at the adolescent unit of UCSF/St, Mary’s Medical Center.  She continues to play violin and perform with Bob. 

 

Press: D. McNally (dennismcnally@mac.com)