Dick Grove

Who is Dick Grove?

Richard Dean "Dick" Grove was an American musician, composer, arranger and award-winning music educator. He performed with Alvino Rey, and worked with Paul Horn, Buddy Rich, and Nancy Wilson.

Grove was very active in the Jazz education field. He started teaching in 1958 at Westlake College of Music. At the time, the school had a strong focus on the Schillinger System, which had also served as a basis for the first curricula at Berklee School of Music. In his Composing&Arranging Program, he mentions that he studied the Schillinger System for 9 years.

Grove is perhaps best known for establishing the Dick Grove School of Music in Los Angeles in 1973. After the Grove School of Music closed in 1991, he established the Grove School Without Walls, a distance learning school where he taught Musicianship and Modern Harmony, Composing and Arranging, and Jazz Keyboard via a series of books and accompanying videos/DVDs.

While operating the Grove School and the School without Walls, Grove authored and published many books covering basic musicianship, jazz harmony and ear training, improvisation, composing and arranging as related to contemporary styles of music. He pioneered innovative concepts such as tying the study of chord symbols, jazz harmony and chord-scale-theory to eartraining by using movable do solfege; the concept of chord families to organize all possible chords; the concept of plural interior chords and "assumed roots" within a chord family, which is instrumental in systematically organizing slash chords, polychords and "upper structure" voicings used in Jazz; the "grid" concept according to criteria of good voice leading; the concept of "shapes" as a systematic approach to understanding voicings, a comprehensive approach to jazz harmonization and reharmonization, and many others.