Articles

Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.

Album Review

Michael Mantler: The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update

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

by Karl Ackermann
November 13, 2014

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

by C. Andrew Hovan
September 1, 2001

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 ...