The Dale Polissar Trio

The Dale Polissar Trio, playing great old jazz standards!

Dale Polissar studied music at the San Francisco Conservatory and at Stanford University, earning an M.A. degree in composing at Stanford and going most of the way to a doctorate there. Then, swept up in the protest movement against the Vietnam War and the general cultural revolution of the sixties, and feeling alien to the modes of composing that had become fashionable in the "serious" music of that time, he dropped out and became a San Francisco street musician for a while — in the glory days of S.F. street musicians! — playing for a belly dance troupe, among other things. He settled into the wonderful artistic community of Bolinas on the Marin County coast, found a soul mate in the painter Judy Molyneux, and continued evolving in his own way as a composer, clarinetist, and poet.

His compositions cover a wide range of styles — jazz, classical, and pop -- the common thread being that they are very melodic and often use fairly traditional harmony.