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Michael Mantler

Michael Mantler was born in 1943 in Vienna, Austria, where he studied trumpet and musicology at the Academy of Music and Vienna University. In 1962 he went to the USA to continue his studies at the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

He moved to New York in 1964 and started playing trumpet with Cecil Taylor and others. During that period he was also involved in the formation of the Jazz Composer's Guild, a collective of musicians and composers, struggling for better working conditions and opportunities to present their new music without compromise. Together with Carla Bley he formed a large jazz orchestra to perform new compositions, resulting in their first recording Communication.

After the Guild discontinued its activities, he toured Europe twice during 1965/66 with the Jazz Realities Quintet, featuring Steve Lacy and Carla Bley. He then established the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association, a non-profit organization to commission, perform, and record new compositions for jazz orchestra.

He recorded a double album of his music during 1968 with the Jazz Composer's Orchestra and soloists Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders, Larry Coryell, and Gato Barbieri. Some of this music was also performed during the "Long Concerts" at the Electric Circus in 1969.

He appeared as trumpet player on Carla Bley's A Genuine Tong Funeral, recorded by Gary Burton, and also on Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra album (1969).

He co-ordinated and participated in the Jazz Composer's Orchestra's next recording project, Carla Bley's Escalator Over The Hill (1968-71).

The problems of independently distributing the orchestra's record label led him to form the New Music Distribution Service in 1972, an organization which was to serve many independent labels for almost 20 years.

In 1973 he started WATT WORKS, a new record label devoted to the presentation of his and Carla Bley's music exclusively. He recorded No Answer, featuring Jack Bruce, for which he wrote music to the words of Samuel Beckett.

The following year he built a recording studio near Woodstock, N.Y. to escape the pressures of commercial recording studios. He received composition grants from the Creative Artists Program Service and the National Endowment for the Arts, and with the aid of a Ford Foundation grant he was able to undertake the recording of his 13 for two orchestras and piano (1975).

He wrote and recorded several more albums for WATT: The Hapless Child, with words by Edward Gorey, featuring Robert Wyatt (1976), Silence, based on the Harold Pinter play, again with Robert Wyatt (1976), Movies, with Larry Coryell and Tony Williams (1977), and More Movies, with Philippe Catherine (1980). During that period he also appeared on albums by John Greaves (Kew Rhone) and Nick Mason (Fictitious Sports), and then toured briefly with his own small group.

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Album Review

Michael Mantler: Coda - Orchestra Suites

Read "Coda - Orchestra Suites" reviewed by Mario Calvitti


Non è mai stato semplice inquadrare l'opera del trombettista e compositore austriaco Michael Mantler. Trasferitosi negli Stati Uniti nel 1960, si è ritrovato coinvolto nel jazz d'avanguardia degli anni '60 a fianco di musicisti come Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp e Roswell Rudd nel Jazz Composers Guild di cui è cofondatore. Da allora si è sempre dedicato alla realizzazione di uno sbocco per le composizioni di jazz orchestrale (sue e di altri), creando a questo scopo la JCOA (Jazz Composer's Orchestra ...

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Album Review

Michael Mantler: The Jazz Composer's Orchestra (Update)

Read "The Jazz Composer's Orchestra (Update)" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro


All'indomani dei suoi settant'anni, compiuti il 10 agosto 2013, Michael Mantler ha voluto farsi (e farci) un grande regalo: ha “occupato" per tre sere (30/31 agosto e 1 settembre) il Porgy & Bess di Vienna con una venticinquina di musicisti al seguito e ha ridato voce alle partiture, debitamente rivedute e corrette, che quarantacinque anni prima (pescando peraltro da materiale risalente fino al 1963) erano confluite nel fondamentale The Jazz Composer's Orchestra, forte di personaggi leggendari quali Gato Barbieri, Pharoah ...

Album Review

Das Rosa Rauschen: 8 Miniaturen (aus dem Zyklus 10 Miniaturen)

Read "8 Miniaturen (aus dem Zyklus 10 Miniaturen)" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro


È il sassofonista berlinese Felix Wahnschaffe, fresco cinquantenne con una serie di partnership di tutto rispetto (Schlippenbach, Vitous, Lacy, Rivers, Tchicai, Nabatov, Takase...), il principale artefice del quartetto protagonista di questo album (sue tutte e otto le “miniature" del titolo), entro le cui geometrie regna un bell'amalgama, capace per lo più di evitare la trappola dell'ovvietà insita in una formula trafficata come poche. Aleggia, nel disco, una bella energia, e insieme una certa raffinatezza, specialmente nei brani ...

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Album Review

Michael Mantler: The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update

Read "The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update" reviewed by Karl Ackermann


Trumpeter Michael Mantler has been a fixture on the US music scene for so long that it's easy to forget the global nature of his career. Born in Vienna, Austria, he came to the US in the early 1960s working with Cecil Taylor and co-founding the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association (JCOA). The resulting JCOA self-titled album (JCOA/ECM, 1968) is historic in its scope of content and musicianship including Mantler's then-wife, pianist Carla Bley, and some of the finest work in ...

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Album Review

Michael Mantler: Movies/More Movies

Read "Movies/More Movies" reviewed by C. Andrew Hovan


As a founder of the Jazz Composers Orchestra, charter member of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and a frequent collaborator with composer and wife Carla Bley, Austrian-born Michael Mantler has served as catalyst to many important avant-garde events over the years, even if his own musical message skirts just under the radar of conventional audiences. Among Mantler’s most vital works are two fusion-drenched productions just recently compiled on disc and released here in the U.S. for the first time. To ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Coda - Orchestra...

ECM Records
2021

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Comment c'est

ECM Records
2017

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For Two

ECM Records
2011

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Cerco Un Paese...

Creative Sources
1995

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