Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Readings: Composer Spotlight - Guy Mintus

At 24 years old, Israeli-born New York-based jazz pianist and composer Guy Mintus has performance credits that include the Kennedy Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Apollo Theater, Symphony Space, Red Sea Jazz Festival, and the Israel Festival. With a focus on music as a gateway to cross-cultural understanding, Guy has collaborated with master musicians from Turkey, Greece, Iran, Morocco, Azerbaijan, Cuba, India and Mali and has participated in multi-disciplinary works with artists in the visual, dance, spoken word, and theater worlds. Guy has been recognized by ASCAP, Downbeat Magazine, BMI and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, among many others.

Portrait of a Moroccan Cantor singing about Love or Memories from a Place I’ve Never Been is Guy's piece, a "personal journey to be perceived it as an open love letter to Morocco and to my late Grandfather," which will be workshopped and read at the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Readings on Thursday, June 16, 7:30pm at Miller Theatre, Columbia University.

Jazz pianist and composer Guy Mintus

American Composers Orchestra: Can you talk about the challenges of writing jazz music for orchestra? What do you believe is the biggest payoff?
Guy Mintus: For me, one of the main challenges has been to fully adjust my mindset to the orchestral mode. First of all, writing for “classically trained” musicians is very different from writing for players who are used to playing Jazz. There are really no discounts. You must make as little assumptions as possible.

More than that, among the various “classical” settings, I find the orchestral one as particularly challenging. It’s a big palette of sounds to control and even just the way orchestras operate, rehearse, the different psychological relationships between conductor-player-composer when we’re all in that room. I learned that these are all very important to understand and can certainly make an impact on one’s choices down to the smallest details.

I believe that the payoff in inviting jazz musicians or musicians of any background into the orchestral world is huge. On the one hand, orchestras are benefited with new musical languages, forms of expression, fresh perspectives and eventually also new audiences. At the same time, for us, being required to be that specific and detailed might be challenging but is also very healthy. When you need to weigh each decision to such extent it truly brings you closer to yourself and to your own musical identity. For example, while often in Jazz situations the composer will just tell the drummer which groove he’d like for a certain piece, while writing for orchestra, you suddenly need to break that groove down and distribute it to three percussionists showing the tiniest nuances in which you’d like that groove played.

ACO: You describe your piece as "an open love letter to Morocco and to my late Grandfather." Can you talk about what Moroccan musical elements the audience will hear? 
GM: Well, the first main element that will occur is the vocal element. Specifically of the great cantorial tradition of Morocco (tradition of cantors singing liturgical or quasi-liturgical Jewish texts over various ). The trigger that started the whole piece has been an old cassette I found in which a Moroccan cantor singing lines from Song of the Songs of the bible. The way he phrased the words, the ornaments he used, the scales he was singing on have all become key elements in the piece.

Aside from that, there are some rhythmical, rethorical and orchestrational elements that are very much influenced by Sha’abi, Gnawa and the tradition of the great Andalusian orchestras. Morocco’s music is as vast and diverse (if not more) than the entire tradition of Jazz. While this is part of the heritage of my late grandfather I’ve gotten to explore it quite a bit and even during the writing period of the piece I’ve had the great fortune to got collaborate separately with two masters of Moroccan music; Ma’alem Hassan Bin jaafer who plays in the Gnawa tradition of the north African Sufis and Oudist Michel Suisa who plays in the Sha’abi and Andalusian traditions. These experiences helped greatly and of course made an impact on the piece.

ACO: What has your experience in the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute been like so far?
GM: The experience has been truly amazing. The week we all spent in UCLA that kicked of this whole adventure has been truly eye opening and uber-inspiring. At the time, I almost didn’t go because the seminar fell on a busy touring period of concerts taking place very far from Los Angeles. Luckily, I finally decided to go even though it meant taking a very long flight from Israel right after a concert and arriving to the seminar a day late. This turned out as an incredible decision.

In the seminar, being around and sharing knowledge with the singular congregation of faculty and students that were there has been beyond anything I could expect. Many of the relationships formed has continued till today and I’m just grateful to be part of this community.

ACO: What are you looking forward to about the readings?
GM: Of course, the thing we all look forward to the most is basically to hear everything coming to life with real instruments and real people. I’m also very much looking forward to spending time and interacting with the mentoring composers, my fellow JCOI composers and the players of the American Composers Orchestra. Every time something you wrote is being played, there are moments that work less than you expected, there are moments that work exactly as you expected and there are moments you didn’t expect much from but will surprise you for the better. I look forward to enjoy and learn from all of those moments.

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Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Spotlight – Composer Michael Dessen - Part Two

"But my dream for the future is to create pieces for, and in a sense, with orchestras that I call "scorestreams," which are dynamically generated scores displayed on networked screens." - Michael Dessen

Find out from composer Michael Dessen what participating in Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute La Jolla Symphony New Music Readings means to him as a jazz composer and about his dream of creating dynamically generated scores displayed on networked screens called “scorestreams.” Here is Part Two of our Q&A with Michael Dessen.   

American Composers Orchestra: What does this experience mean to you as a jazz composer? What would you like to say to other jazz composers who may be interested in applying to JCOI?

Michael Dessen: I'm not sure what it even means to be a "jazz composer" these days, and I'll leave it to others to decide whether the label fits me since I don't really care, but it is true that jazz traditions are one of the core inspirations for my music. But it's not just the sonic vocabulary or musical forms in jazz that are important for me. I'm also referring to the methods that jazz musicians developed for creating their music, the way their work embodied particular values, ideas, ways of being together in the world. Jazz musicians throughout the last century established a sophisticated set of new compositional techniques, but they also moved in very fluid ways across conventional boundaries between composer and performer. 

Of course plenty of composers throughout history have also been performers, but I'm referring to something more. Performing in jazz goes way beyond interpreting a composer's ideas - it requires you to make choices that are also compositional ones, and the context in which this takes place is also a community affair, since musicians move frequently among different roles and power relationships, being a sideperson one day and a bandleader the next, and learning from all these collaborative experiences. So for me, the legacies of jazz really unsettle this whole idea of single authorship in a fundamental way, while still retaining certain benefits of that tradition such as working with complex, precomposed musical structures. 

Even an early, iconic jazz composer like Duke Ellington had a deeply collaborative notion of composition, and depended on his performers to bring their personal voices to the music. This contrasts with what you usually find in the world of orchestral music, where musicians expect extremely precise instructions from composers, and where the size of the ensemble typically precludes the extensive rehearsal time required to bring the players' individual sounds and identities more fully into the creative process itself. But I can also imagine a future for the orchestra that embraces new ways of working, and does so without throwing tradition out the window. I also know that orchestral musicians do think of their own sound in very personal terms, and that most would enjoy opportunities to work collaboratively with composers, the way that contemporary music chamber ensembles are doing more and more today.

So to answer your first question, I have to confess that this JCOI experience is part of a longer-range plan for me. For this first piece, I'm focused on improving my skills writing for orchestra, so I decided not to include improvisation, technology or anything too outside the box in terms of method. But my dream for the future is to create pieces for, and in a sense, with orchestras that I call "scorestreams," which are dynamically generated scores displayed on networked screens. I've created several of these for small ensembles in the past few years. My scorestreams are basically custom software applications that contain a kind of logic for navigating a collection of musical notations. This gives each piece a recurring identity across performances, but each performance is also different because both the software and the musicians can make different choices. It'll be a challenge to find an orchestra willing to take the time to really experiment with me on this, but I'm optimistic it could happen. The Brussels Philharmonic recently started using Samsung tablets to read music, and clearly our future is increasingly paperless, so pretty soon one of my biggest logistical hurdles - how to get access to that many tablet screens - will disappear. And when that happens, orchestras will eventually discover that in addition to being a cost-effective substitute for sheet music, touch screens and computer software open up many new possibilities for extending the ways we create music together.

About the 2nd question, I would just say that if the orchestra is a resource that could be useful to you in expanding your own music, don't be afraid to just dive in, pay some dues through study, and most of all imagine your own relationship to the orchestra and seek ways of putting that into practice. And right now JCOI is one of the best ways, maybe one of the only ways, for jazz composers to go through this process, so I hope they keep the program going. Also, orchestras carry a huge organizational apparatus and can be quite rigid about notation and other conventions, all of which can seem like obstacles for those of us used to working in looser, small group contexts, but Steve Schick made a comment on this at JCOI last summer that was especially inspiring to me: He suggested that despite all of those constraints, we should remember that the orchestra is basically huge group of musicians eager to work with you to make music together, ultimately not that different than any other band. I realized that this is how I felt intuitively about orchestras when I first started playing in them as a teenager, and that this spirit of cooperative music making is still what makes it exciting for me to return to the orchestra now as a composer coming from improvisatory traditions.