Photography by Kathy Tran.
Avant-garde jazz came to Gregg Prickett later in life. An Oak Cliff resident since 1998, he grew up in Garland where a grade-school friend who was from England introduced him to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
By middle school he was playing rock ’n’ roll and classical guitar styles.
Prickett, 55, joined the Dallas surf band The Buena Vistas in 1984 and stayed with them for many years.
“Back then, you were in one band,” he says. “It was like a marriage or a family.”
He started playing upright bass and getting into Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. He played in a band called Mr. Pink, which although it didn’t represent his personal artistic point of view, the band gigged a lot. They often performed at places like Sambuca and Terilli’s, which allowed him to book his own music at those venues.
In the Dallas/Denton music scene, he started playing with drummer Earl Harvin, who is from Dallas and now lives in Berlin, and Dallas-based guitar genius Bill Longhorse.
In Oak Cliff, he met experimental musicians Aaron and Stefan González and their dad, Dennis, an acclaimed free jazz musician. Prickett used to see these goth or metal kids walking around all the time. The brothers noticed Prickett’s dark lawn ornaments. And one day they struck up a conversation. Prickett started playing with their family band, Yells at Eels. Unconscious Collective is a trio consisting of Prickett and the González brothers.
Over the last two decades, he’s always played in multiple bands at a time, but now “one or two is all I can get my head around.”
Monks of Saturnalia is his main project now, although it’s a constant struggle to get band members to rehearsal, especially since there are fewer opportunities for shows nowadays.
When musicians play together for many years, “there’s a magic that can happen,” he says.
“If you think about Coltrane’s Classic Quartet, they played together every night for years,” he says. “You can’t go down to the 5 Spot or the Vanguard and play every night.”
He’s also currently working on jazz standards with vocalist Lily Taylor.
That’s a world away from his work in free jazz, an improvisational form that can go any direction but is sewn together by underlying threads of melody or rhythm.
“I’m learning all the time,” he says. “If you put a good band together, you’re learning from those people.”
Taylor says Prickett’s work in free jazz “is really special.”
“It’s designed to be a creative vehicle to take people places,” Prickett says. “My idea is for everyone to go someplace together that can only come from melody having some kind of agreement and then having a discussion phonically.”
He performed with free-jazz drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson about a year before Jackson’s death in 2013. Jackson gave him these words to live by: “If you’re doing your job right, it makes people’s lives better.”
Prickett was laid off from his job as an art fabricator recently, when the company he was working for closed, and is looking for work.
A song that reminds him of Oak Cliff
Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” (both variations).
An unforgettable moment in his music career
Playing in Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society at The Kessler in 2012. Sadly, this turned out to be his last performance.
How his life in music changed since 2019
I have been obliged to pare down or tighten my focus on how many and which projects are possible realistically to develop and pursue.
An accomplishment he’s proud of
I’d rather say I’m grateful to have made a lot of music with more than my fair share of amazing musicians.
How you can support his work
Come see our performances! We are doing our best to play shows that are as safe as possible. I have plans to release Monks of Saturnalia’s work within the coming year. I also have vinyl copies of Pleistocene Moon by Unconscious Collective available.
