[5] In addition to fully notated compositions, Grasse has collaborated with Los Angeles–based ensembles on structured improvisations and site-specific pieces as a composer and electric guitarist since the late 1990s.
[7] In 2003, the Los Angeles Times' critic Victoria Looseleaf reviewed his Skirball Cultural Center Siteworks electronic music collaboration with choreographer Parijat Desai: "Making felicitous use of the Mark Taper Courtyard in the site-specific series, choreographer Parijat Desai, in collaboration with Liam Clancy, Iddrisu Saaka and Denise Uyehara, performed “Water, Tree, Stone,” an elegiac take on the notion of peace.
Set to Jonathon Grasse’s sound collage that veered from techno to Portuguese love songs and talk of cruise missiles, the quartet traversed the patio with butoh-like deliberateness before brandishing a large papier-mache globe among them.
In 2024 at a Piano Spheres concert at 2220 Arts + Archives, Kallay premiered Grasse's piece for microtonal solo keyboard "Reeded Cottage, 1905 (Knipton, Leicestershire)."
As an electric guitarist, Grasse began experimenting with spontaneous improvisation with writer and pianist Carter Scholz, whom he met in 1986 as a member of the Mills College gamelan.
It will certainly serve as a reference to those working with or in musical institutions in Minas Gerais and those teaching Brazilian history and music.” [18] Since the early 1990s, Grasse has pursued fieldwork investigations and archival research in and around Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
There, he has interviewed members of the Clube da Esquina (the Corner Club) music collective based around Milton Nascimento, luthiers producing the guitar-like viola (Brazilian ten-string guitar), and studied the Afro-Brazilian genre of Congado, among other topics.
Grasse later co-authored the chapter on gamelan in a 1998 biographical work on Harrison written by then UC Santa Cruz professors Fred Lieberman and Leta Miller, before completing his UCLA doctoral monograph on that composer in 1999.