The California-born composer Michael Shrieve (1949) first came to prominence as the drummer for Carlos Santana. Having become a percussion star, he was part of the supergroup Go formed by Stomu Yamashta and founded Automatic Man. During the 1980s, he supported himself through lucrative collaborations. When he moved to New York in 1978, he began to take his own virtuosity seriously. He embarked on the Novo Combo adventure, then collaborated with Klaus Schulze (who returned the favor on Transfer Station Blue), and finally unleashed everything he had learned in twenty years of professional experience in that tour de force of programmed percussion that is In Suspect Terrain.
Alternating between tornadoes of water vases (Tide), trains of computerized percussion (Ratatouille), the tinkling of Oriental sticks (Swamp), arcane jungle sounds (Orangutan), and dizzying tam-tam solos (the title track), Shrieve called into question half a century of Western percussion science.

At that point, Shrieve assembled a series of signature ensembles in search of increasingly evocative harmonies: in a percussive duo with David Beal for Big Picture; with Steve Roach on synth and David Torn on guitar for Leaving Time; with Mark Isham on trumpet, Andy Summers and David Torn on guitars for the incendiary "punk-jazz" of Stiletto (July 1988); with Jonas Hellborg on bass and Brian "Buckethead" Carroll on guitar for the visionary and hypnotic jazz-rock of Octave Of The Holy Innocents; and with Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz for the revolutionary jams of Fascination (November 1993).

Leaving Time is branded by the desert delusions of Roach, but allows Shrieve several ethnic cues, such as the cosmic raga of Big Sky and the sinister March Of Honor. But the best is perhaps found in the more jazz-rock tracks: San Diego, a tumultuous piece propelled by a Japanese cadence and David Torn's guitar stabs; Tribes, with its tropical frenzy and a dizzying guitar glissando; and Edge Runner, the pinnacle of Shrieve's hyper-kinetic tribalism and Torn's loquacious distortions.

With Stiletto, Shrieve perhaps finds the right dimension—a melancholy bebop estranged by dreamlike cadences and dissonances (Stiletto, Moon Over You), immersed in Hassell-like atmospheres (Gauguin's Regret) and psychedelic expansions of consciousness (Bella Coola).

But his most brilliant album remains Big Picture, a collection of almost exclusively percussive fantasies in which Shrieve acts as arranger and conductor for an orchestra of percussion instruments. The melodic themes of The Invisible Architecture float ineffably over rhythmic castles as daring as they are fluid, alongside the inevitable pan-ethnic mimesis (Izibongo, Mon Amie), performed moreover with a magniloquent fatalism that is, to say the least, unusual.
The title track, the most jazz-oriented piece, intones a sinister and solemn "pow wow," and no less martial and threatening is Rocked In The Cradle, yet both crown their ceremonial with the most serene optimism. The dazed and metaphysical mood of the work is well summarized by the crescendo of trills in Shaman's Drum, which turns from lugubrious to festive, and even more so by Unspeakable Dawn, in which a faint melodic line repeats mechanically over a rolling march tempo.
Two conflicting processes preside over the thematic development of the tracks: a slow metamorphosis, generally in crescendo, which tends to transform the atmosphere from tragic suspense into exuberant triumph, and an obstinate minimalism that tends to recycle a cadence and a phrase to the point of paranoia. It is exemplary how Shrieve resolves this contradiction in the final apotheosis of Iron Voices. The impeccable production, the minute chiseling of the harmonies, and the crystalline sound of the percussion confer an intensity of mystical ascesis upon the record.

On Fascination, Shrieve masterfully takes advantage of his two prestigious collaborators to reshuffle the cards of black popular music, profaning the funk of The Meters in Sam The Man, bebop in The Glass Tent, soul in Tell Me Everything, and soft jazz in the title track. Then he sinks his rhythmic claws into the effervescent suite The Great Ambassador, propels the John Zorn-esque grindcore of One Nation Invisible, and knocks the cosmic-ambient models of Schulze and Roach off-balance in Soundings In Fathoms.

Shrieve "understood" the role of percussion in new age music just as Hendrix understood that of the guitar in rock music.

The double-disc Two Doors (november 1993 - CMP, 1996) is one of Shrieve's most ambitious works, two jazz-rock power trios (the second one with Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz) that explore a broad range of styles.