Patrick Gleeson

Gleeson began experimenting with electronic music in the mid-'60s at the San Francisco Tape Music Center using a Buchla synth and other devices. In 1968, "upon hearing Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach", he bought a Moog synthesizer and opened Different Fur Recording in San Francisco. which had its 50th anniversary in 2018. Gleeson has said, "It was just this little one room studio in the Mission but somehow it became an institution," responsible for many ground-breaking albums and film scores, including Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and Sextant, Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Apocalypse Now (where Gleeson led the team of synthesists that created the score).

Gleeson worked extensively with Hancock in the 1970s, touring with the Mwandishi Band - pioneering the use of synthesizers in jazz performance – and appearing on Crossings, Sextant, Sunlight and Death Wish. Gleeson has performed, produced and recorded with many other jazz musicians, including Lenny White, Freddie Hubbard, Charles Earland, Bennie Maupin,Wallace Roney, Eddie Henderson, Julian Priester, Joe Henderson, Ron Carter and Geri Allen. His rock credits include Journey, Jefferson Starship and Sammy Hagar.

Gleeson has recorded a number of solo albums, starting with Beyond the Sun: An Electronic Portrait of Holst's "The Planets" in 1976, to which Wendy Carlos contributed the sleeve notes. The album was a final nominee for "best engineered recording-classical" Grammy. Gleeson has has composed music for many television series, several of them Grammy-nominated, including Knots Landing.

Gleeson has composed and performed a number of film soundtracks, including The Plague Dogs, Apocalypse Now, Crossroads and The Bedroom Window. He has scored nine television series, among them Knots Landing.

In 2017, Gleeson began playing live again, first with several solo performances and then with a trio with Sam Morrison on reeds and either Michael Shrieve or Lenny White on drums. His most recent jazz album is "Jazz Criminal," with Jim Lang, Wallace Roney and Bennie Maupin. Gleeson has said the title is a kind of retort to "the jazz police who reliably hate whatever I've done most recently."

Awards

California Arts Council Composition grant (for music performed by Gleeson and the Kronos Quartet). The National Endowment, for Jazz Composition

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