Jack Grassel

Jack Richard Grassel was born on September 3, 1948, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Lawrence and Ruth (nee Rinas) Grassel. Music ran through the family. His grandfather Joe and great-uncle Ruby led bands, his aunt Adeline led an all-girl band called The Sunshine Girls, his aunt Iris had a band called Star and Her Five Points, and his uncle Percy Grassel was the wedding bandleader in Park Falls, Wisconsin.

At about two years old he reached up to his mother's piano to pick out songs from the radio by ear. His father bought him a small accordion and lessons, and two years later entered him in the American Accordionists competition in Chicago. At six he played his first paid engagements on the Bar O Ranch Show, and in 1959, at eleven, he won the Wisconsin State Accordion Competition. Teachers told him he had perfect pitch, which he later called a wonderful and sometimes difficult gift.

Grassel's formal training came largely through school music programs and his own practice. School band director Jim Brusky gave him free lessons on upright bass in exchange for playing in the sixth grade orchestra, and another teacher, Skip Wagner, formed student combos and found them paying gigs. In 1961 he took up electric bass to join The Triumphs, a rock band of seventh graders, and at fourteen he was already teaching bass at Milwaukee's Modern Music Store.

He completed two years of college before his musical direction changed in 1968, when Mitchell Covic, a clerk at Discount Records, introduced him to jazz recordings. Grassel bought a guitar and practiced about fifteen hours a day for six months. He kept a daily practice regimen for roughly sixty years, continuing it even after his 2025 stroke.

From 1965 to 1982 Grassel worked as a full-time professional musician, often playing between 10 and 27 engagements a week. His work spanned Broadway touring shows, the Ringling Brothers Circus and Holiday on Ice bands, rock, blues, country and ragtime in bars, school jazz concerts, studio commercials, a morning radio band and a six-night jazz residency at Milwaukee's Pfister Hotel. He estimated his peak year, 1982, at 522 gigs. He played with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra from 1969 to 2003 and performed with artists including Luciano Pavarotti, Bob Hope, Rosemary Clooney, Jay Leno, Nancy Wilson, Cab Calloway, Tom Jones, Doc Severinsen, Slide Hampton, Stanley Jordan and Ed Thigpen.

In the 1980s he was a lead performer in What on Earth, an inventive Milwaukee jazz group co-founded with bassist Mitch Covic. He founded Frozen Sky Records, and his first albums of original compositions, Magic Cereal and If You're Too Crazy, led Guitar Player magazine to feature him in its New Talent section, after which he became a contributing writer. The Hofner guitar company hired him to record the promotional album Guitar Smoke, and he recorded a duo album with jazz guitarist Tal Farlow. Over his career he released 21 CDs, wrote 70 compositions and published 23 instruction books, including Big Ax, Super Ax, Power Practicing and The Reharmonized Real Book (2020).

He also taught for decades. He was a co-creator of the jazz degree program at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, and in 1983 he became chairman of music at Milwaukee Area Technical College, where he designed the Music Occupations degree and taught until a major illness in 2004. MATC dean Hannah Pickett said he never taught in an ordinary manner. From 1998 he performed mainly with his wife, singer Jill Jensen, as the duo Jack and Jill Jazz.

Grassel was an inventor as well as a player. He designed a hybrid he called the SuperAx, combining guitar and bass strings, and recorded the album Live at the Uptowner with guitarist Kirk Tatnall, who built one too. In 2013 he built a triple-neck instrument combining mandolin, six-string guitar and bass necks, which he played in performance alongside harmonica, keyboard and vocals so that the duo with Jill Jensen could sound like a full band. The instrument, which writer Kevin Lynch described as The Trident, stood on display at his memorial in October 2026.

Grassel was first married to Mary Grassel, and the couple had two sons, Andrew and Benjamin, both of whom died within a year of each other in 2022. In 1998 he met singer and actress Jill Jensen at one of his shows, and they married on December 29, 1999, making their home in the Racine area of Wisconsin. Through Jensen he gained a stepdaughter, Elizabeth (Beth) Schram. He was survived by his wife, his stepdaughter, four grandchildren (Ethan, Oliver, Gabrielle and Gunnar), and his brothers Steve, Scott and Michael.

The couple wintered on Isla Mujeres, Mexico, from 2000 to 2020. Grassel was a vegetarian and a health enthusiast. He suffered a major illness in 2004 and a stroke in January 2025, after which Jensen said he radiated more tender love and appreciation than ever before.

Grassel believed in relentless practice and lifelong learning. Jensen compared his attitude to that of cellist Pablo Casals, who still practiced in his nineties, and said he never stopped trying to get better. In his own written history he lamented how the full-time professional musician's life in Milwaukee faded after 1983 as recorded music, smoking and drunk driving concerns, and home entertainment cut into live work, and he credited a college dean's insistence on visible daily practice as an example to students. He resisted genre boundaries and, after his stroke, worked on his singing voice so he could perform any kind of music he wanted.

Grassel is remembered as one of the most accomplished guitarists in the Milwaukee region and as a teacher whose MATC and Wisconsin Conservatory students went on to professional careers. The Milwaukee Jazz Institute said he influenced generations of musicians in Milwaukee and beyond. Shepherd Express writer Kevin Lynch, who covered the arts in Milwaukee for more than four decades, called him one of the most creative people he had known. His instruction books, recordings and the triple-neck instrument remain part of his legacy.

Grassel won the Wisconsin State Accordion Competition in 1959 at age 11. He was featured in Guitar Player magazine's New Talent section and later wrote for the magazine. In 2000 readers of Guitar One magazine voted him one of the ten best guitarists in America. He won six WAMI (Wisconsin Area Music Industry) awards as Jazz Artist of the Year and, according to his obituary, 12 industry awards in total.

Albums as leader on Frozen Sky include Magic Cereal (1986), If You're Too Crazy for Your Body (1989), Solo Burner (1993), Christmas Presence (1998), Guitar Smoke (2001), Live at the Uptowner (2002), Thunderstones (2002), Ghost Ridge, Matrix (2003), Two Guys with Guitars (2004) and 10 (2006). With Jill Jensen he recorded five albums, including Seems Like Dreams, It's About the Music, Snow People, Live at the Carlton Grange and Jack and Jill Jazz. His books include Guitar Seeds (1974), Monster Chops (1976), Power Practicing (1992), Big Ax (1994), Super Ax (1996), Jazz Rhythm Guitar (2002), Brain Training (2004), 131 Axercises (2004), 70 Jazz Compositions (2008) and The Reharmonized Real Book (2020).

Grassel suffered a stroke in January 2025 and spent many months in daily therapy. On August 16, 2026, he and Jill Jensen gave their first public concert since the stroke, a standing-room-only show at the Villa Terrace museum in Milwaukee. He had a solo concert planned for November at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts.

On August 26, 2026, while driving in Caledonia, Wisconsin, he suffered a fatal medical event and his car crossed the centerline into a head-on collision in which another driver, an 83-year-old woman, also died. Jensen said the medical examiner found he was not conscious at the time and felt no pain. He was flown to Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee, where he died that night at age 77, with Jensen and her daughter Beth beside him. His body was cremated. A celebration of his life drew several hundred people, including many Milwaukee musicians, to a banquet hall near Racine on October 18, 2026.