We recently connected with George Grosman and have shared our conversation below.

George, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I started studying classical guitar at age 9 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. By the age of 14 I had already composed a few songs and poems and by 15 I had a performing band and a seemingly smooth career path ahead. I was going to pursue music – specifically composing original music – as a career, no doubt in my mind.
My plans were rudely interrupted with the invasion of my country by the Soviet Red Army. We were forced to flee the country. I settled in Tel Aviv, Israel, and within a couple of years was performing and earning a part-time living in a number of bands. I continued writing songs, including a rock opera based on Oscar Wilde’s epic poem, “”Ballad of Reading Gaol”
Life intervened via a series of events (conscription into the IDF being one of them, as well as continous rows and disgreements with family) From that point on, I wandered through many countries on three continents. I completed an M.A. in Linguistics in the UK and from the age of 25 – 42, music was on the back burner. By the time I picked it up again and began my career as a jazz guitarist/composer in earnest, I was 15 – 20 years older than my peers.
I feel that my time spent traveling, studying linguistics, not to mention raising a family created too long an interruption. I have had some fantastic career highlights but wish I had been much more focused and goal-oriented 20 years earlier.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

This will be long! Like millions of others of my generation, I got enamored with the Beatles in the mid-sixties – I would have been around 11 or 12 years old. The difference was that unlike those millions of others, I lived in a Communist country (Czechoslovakia) and there were only two ways of getting Beatles (and other “British invasion” bands) music: either you put up with mediocre arrangements and Czech translations, performed by local musicians, or you knew someone in the West who would send you records. This was risky because more often than not, customs officials would confiscate the records for their own use. Slowly, a local rock scene began to develop but I was about 10 years too young to truly become a part of it. Nevertheless, at the age of 14 I had my first band and we enthusiastically played covers of bands such as The Stones, The Who and of course The Fab Four. My English was limited so whatever lyrics we managed to copy from the records was garbled and unintelligible to native English speakers.

A few years later, after emgrating to Israel, I formed a number of bands, the most successful of which, The Middle East Blues Band, became quite successful on the local scene. We played high school dances and events almost every weekend and started to make some money in music. There was no doubt in my mind by that point that music was going to be my career: specifically playing guitar and composing. I was always the lead singer in my bands – by default! I simply was the only one with a decent voice and so the task fell to me and over the years I have become a decent vocalist.

The whole history would take countless pages and I need to summarize: I performed in London while studying at the Guildhall School of Music. I performed in Reykjavik, Iceland, where I lived for a number of years and led two very successful bands: Red House (a rowdy blues band) and Kandis (R&B plus originals) Kandis had a huge radio hit with our cover of Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night” recorded reggae style. Most of my adult life and music career was spent in Toronto, Canada. I started studying and performing jazz from the 1920’s through the 1950’s, the Classic American Songbook. I perforemed at all the jazz venues in Toronto, as well as at the prestigious Toronto International Jazz Festival numerous times. It was my honor to call jazz giant Larry Coryell a friend and I opened for Larry when he played the Hugh’s Room club in Toronto in 2012. During my time in Toronto I was also a prolific guitar teacher with as many as 40 private students, as well as teaching night classes for adults. I played on and produced around 20 CD’s, many of them with my original music. In 2013, my band recorded a Sidney Bechet tribute album, “Sidney, Mon Ami” which achieved solid success on the airwaves in Canada and the U.S. We toured the album, perfoming in the provinces of Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia in Canada and in Florida, Georgia and Iowa in the U.S.

In 2011 I applied for and received an O-1 visa for the United States (granted to “aliens of extraordinary ability”). I bought a house in Orlando, Florida and had my most successful years between 2012 – 2020. I worked as a studio musician at Full Sail University and later for Disney Orlando, performing and recording jazz and original music. I got my “green card” in 2015 and became a U.S. citizen in 2022. Unfortunately, the pandemic forced me into early retirement and although I continue to perform regularly, my career has substantially slowed down – not due to my age but due to what the pandemic did to all of us musicians: canceled concerts, tours and regular studio work. Enough said.

I now teach guitar privately to a few select students who love the kind of jazz I do. I continue to compose and upload music to Instagram and YouTube and have countless songs and albums on Spotify and the other streamers.

What sets me apart from others is easy to define. No one I know has performed and lived in 6 countries on 3 continents, speaks 3 languages fluently and has had their music performed on radio stations in countrie as varied as Israel – Iceland, the U.S. and Canada. I bring decades of experience to everything I do: teaching guitar, performing, writing and producing.

My proud moments have been many: peforming at the Toronto Jazz Festival, working for Disney with some of the very best musicians in the world, working for an institution as prestigious as Full Sail Univeristy and above all, that evening in 2012 when I opened for jazz guitar legend, Larry Coryell – one of my idols in the 1970s, and there I was on the stage with him…still seems like a dream.

Working in music for all these decades has not provided financial stability – some years were excellent, some not so much – but I have spent my life doing what I love and only very few can say that!!

(as an aside, I also write prose and published a book of short stories in 2023, as well as numerous translations from Czech to English)

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Most definitely. Any person who takes his/her talent seriously strives to let the world know about and take joy in this talent. If you don’t feel that striving, that energy that keeps you awake, that makes you pick up the phone a thousand times or write that email to a thousand people or work in a studio for 24 hours straight to create the best product possible – then, in my opinion, your God-given talent has gone to waste. The need to be heard, listened to, read has driven everything I have done as a musician – though, as I stated, I was a late starter and had not realize the amount of effort needed until I was in my early 40’s (I had always written and created but that driving force, the goal of gaining an audience hit me late compared to many colleagues)

How did you build your audience on social media?

The only advice is to create content ALL THE TIME. I post something to either IG or YouTube several times a week. It’s always quantity that counts – although it should not come at the expense of quality, of course. If you have a short idea for a song – post it just as an idea and when it’s fully developed – then post that.
The other important thing is – know that no one will do the work for you. It’s YOUR work and YOU are responsible for uploading/posting/releasing as much of it as you can.
The rewards come slowly – but they WILL happen if you work hard and are consistent

Contact Info:

• Facebook: quit that platform years ago
• Twitter: x.xom/george_jazzcat
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/georgegrosman
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/george-grosman
• Other: instagram.com/george.jazzcat

  spotify.com (search George Grosman)

  Instagram has been my main and most successful outlet

Image Credits

Lado Soudek