Hear Me Out #2 — Glenn Jones & Liam Grant

📅 Friday, 30 October 2026
🕗 20:00
🎶 Show starts: 20:30
📍 OCCII, Amsterdam

One night after Chicago Underground Duo, Hear Me Out changes atmosphere completely.

No electronics. No trumpet and drums colliding with avant-garde jazz.

This time, mostly some wood, steel strings, ten fingers — and a musical tradition that has spent more than sixty years finding increasingly strange things to do with an acoustic guitar.

For Hear Me Out #2, we’re heading to OCCII for a double bill by Glenn Jones and Liam Grant, two generations of musicians connected by the tradition usually known as American Primitive guitar. OCCII describes the evening as one of “raw American Primitive fingerpicking”; the current bill also includes French project 12V5 and DJ Nerf.

### Glenn Jones

Glenn Jones first became known through Cul de Sac, the Boston band whose music occupied its own territory somewhere between post-rock, psychedelia, minimalism and experimental music — and which famously collaborated extensively with former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki.

Since then, Jones has become one of the major contemporary voices of the American Primitive tradition pioneered by John Fahey.

Across ten solo albums, he has developed an extraordinarily personal language for six- and twelve-string guitar and banjo, using unusual tunings, partial capos and intricate fingerpicking to make music that can feel simultaneously ancient and intensely autobiographical. OCCII highlights precisely those self-created tunings and techniques as central to his playing.

His music carries traces of Fahey, Jack Rose, John Jackson, old 78 rpm records and decades spent inside the American underground — but it rarely feels like an exercise in revivalism.

These are pieces that behave more like memories: detailed, slightly elusive, sometimes funny, sometimes melancholic, and never particularly interested in showing off simply for the sake of it.

### Liam Grant

Then there is Liam Grant, representing a much younger generation taking the same vocabulary somewhere else.

A guitarist and improviser from New England, Grant works with modal forms, long-form improvisation, ragas and propulsive fingerpicked pieces that openly inherit the world of Takoma Records, John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Peter Walker, as well as later figures such as Jones himself and Jack Rose.

But there is a rougher, younger energy to it too.

His music is deeply attached to the landscapes of New England, while his approach brings a kind of DIY/punk attitude to a tradition that can otherwise risk becoming overly reverential.

His 2025 album Prodigal Son, recorded around 6-string, 12-string and lap steel guitar, helped establish him as one of the younger musicians currently pushing this vocabulary forward.

And there is something particularly nice about hearing Jones and Grant on the same night: not master and imitator, but two generations using the same basic materials and arriving at rather different places.

### Two nights, two completely different concerts

If you’re coming to Hear Me Out #1 the evening before, this is also a good demonstration of what I want this series to be.

Thursday at BIMHUIS:
Chicago Underground Duo — avant-jazz, improvisation, electronics, rhythm.

Friday at OCCII:
Glenn Jones & Liam Grant — acoustic guitars, fingerpicking, repetition, memory and American folk traditions pulled slightly out of shape.

No genre requirement.

Just music worth hearing.

### Tickets

Doors open at 20:00 and the show starts at 20:30.

At the moment tickets are:
€10 presale
€12 at the door

Tickets are arranged individually; RSVP’ing on Meetup does not reserve admission to the concert.

We’ll meet at OCCII at 20:00 and go in together.