Looking back at jazz history, it's not hard to identify the important musical training grounds, places that sparked a kind of extended creative combustion through long lists of influential teachers and alumni. The Lenox School of Jazz, a summer program in the late '50s attended by Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Ran Blake, could be considered one such place. The studio of the late composer and pianist Lennie Tristano, where young players sometimes found themselves rubbing elbows with Art Pepper or Lee Konitz, was another.
Photo: Eileen Barroso
Hindsight may be 20/20, but the recently-completed Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute appears to be — or at least a strong indicator of seismic shifts along the fault lines between jazz and classical or so-called new music. Last week, Columbia University hosted the inaugural JCOI workshop, the first of its kind and a collaborative effort between its Center for Jazz Studies and the American Composers Orchestra. The idea was to give jazz composers access and exposure to the latest compositional techniques for orchestra.
Directed by trombonist and composer George Lewis, JCOI's prestigious faculty included those well-versed in jazz and other improvising traditions — composers Derek Bermel, Fabien Levy, Anthony Davis, Tania Leon, Jane Ira Bloom and Alvin Singleton — along with Boston Modern Orchestra Project conductor Gil Rose and members of the Wet Ink ensemble. Organized by topic, seminars focused on the history of orchestral music since 1945, the particulars of contemporary orchestration, improvisation and the orchestra and working with conductors, copyists, and music publishers. [Specifics will be covered in-depth in a future post and on-air story. —Ed.]
Complete on >> http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2010/07/26/128782039/jazz-composers-orchestra-institute?ft=1&f=10002
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