Jam Sessions
Any discussion of jazz would be incomplete without considering New Orleans, arguably the genre’s birthplace. In February, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra gave the world premiere of jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s fully notated, threemovement Concerto for Roger Dickerson. Blanchard and the LPO had previously given the 2007 local premiere of A Tale of God’s Will, a suite for jazz combo and or-
chestra culled from Blanchard’s score for Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary film about Hurricane Katrina When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. But the Concerto commission, funded by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Foundation, offered the composer more freedom. “This piece takes me into new territory as a composer,” Blanchard, a New Orleans native, told the city’s Times-Picayune. “I’ve written music for close to 50 films, but this will be the first score that isn’t part of the collaborative process of movie-making. It’s all about my ideas, without having to conform to somebody else’s vision.” The title is a nod to Blanchard’s former piano teacher, who also drilled him in the rules of counterpoint and serial composition. Few jazz artists may have had the benefits of such training, or the opportunity to cut one’s teeth orchestrating film scores, as Blanchard has. With that in mind, the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute—a collaboration between New York’s American Composers Orchestra and the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University— gathered 30 composers in July 2010 to discuss some of the issues of composing for orchestra with CJS Director George Lewis and mentor composers Derek Bermel, Fabien Levy, Anthony Davis, Tania León,
Trumpeter Irvin Mayfield performed his orchestral work The Art of Passion with members of his quintet and the Minnesota Orchestra, where he is artistic director of Jazz at Orchestra Hall, in July 2009.
americanorchestras.org
Travis Anderson
of edification,” he says via email. “One of my talents, I think, is that I have the ability to translate what I gather from the written scores and fold it into my improvisational vocabulary. There is no rupture between the two disciplines for me, but there’s a two-part process: on the one hand studying something in a deliberate way; on the other hand letting something intuitive happen from what I have gathered.” In some cases that process can seem almost instantaneous. Yoo, a childhood friend of Mehldau, recalls listening to the pianist working on a solo piece by the French composer Gabriel Fauré before a Highway Rider performance in Vienna. Later that night, Yoo says, when they reached a piano cadenza section in the score “I just started giggling because he sounded exactly like Fauré!”
Jane Ira Bloom, and Alvin Singleton. Some of the participants—who ranged in age from 16 to 66—will have their works read June 5 and 6 at Columbia’s Miller Theatre by the American Composers Orchestra and the Wet Ink Ensemble under the direction of Gil Rose. Despite its name, the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute had a certain element of genre transcendence. “People who came to this workshop weren’t interested in writing jazz for symphony orchestra,” observes Lewis, a skilled improviser on the trombone who is also well-versed in the modernist classical and electronic music traditions. “They were just interested in expressing themselves and in making use of the very diverse contemporary musical landscape in order to create new music. The question of how much of it was jazz—that sort of policing question—I think they were happy to leave to others.” In that sense, a jazz artist who wants to write for orchestra must answer the same questions as any other composer. “There are some ideas that are not orchestral ideas, whether or not those ideas involve jazz,” notes Bermel, a frequent mentor at the ACO’s other composer-training programs. “Not everything wants a large mass of string players sawing away. Once you decide that you do want a large section of string players, the question is, why? And what is their role here?” If that’s the case, however, why form an orchestral jazz institute at all—why not simply invite jazz artists to participate in the wide range of composer-training initiatives already offered by the American Composers Orchestra? “We’re likely to create a program wherever we see a set of challenges that seem unique to a particular population,” explains ACO Executive Director Michael Geller, who had the initial idea for the institute and got the ball rolling by calling Lewis. For jazz artists, Geller points to things like training and background, access to opportunities with orchestras, and incorporating improvisation into the orchestra, but also to cultural differences. “Just for jazz composers to understand how an orchestra rehearsal runs,” Geller says, “particularly a professional orchestra where you’re dealing with strict timekeeping—start time, stop time, break time—all the things that our colleagues in the professional orchestra world under-
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