roio

JAZZ ON SUNDAY: MICHAEL MANTLER - VIENNA 2022

December 11, 2022 – 5:52 am

Fifty years ago today, Beatle George told us that All Things Must Pass. Then he told us about Living in the Material World. For 36 years, BigO has been trying to keep the spirit and history of the music alive. Before all things pass, we still need your help to live in this material world. You can help us to do this with a kind donation. Please give what you are happy to give…

HOW TO DONATE
Our costs will always be there. So readers who can donate towards the cost of the site, please open a Skrill account. Readers who wish to contribute to BigO will now have to use Skrill (click  here). We are no longer able to use PayPal to receive donations. Register an account at Skrill. To make a payment, use this e-mail address as recipient’s e-mail address in Skrill: mail2[at]bigomagazine.com. Looking forward to hearing from you.

JUST TO LET YOU KNOW
To reduce spamming, the BigO website is going through Cloudflare. What it does is scan your browser to ensure the visitor is not a spam. Do not be alarmed as this usually takes only a few seconds.  Email us if you still have difficulty accessing the BigO site; or playing or downloading the tracks. If you know a better way of reducing spam, do let us know.

+ + + + +

MICHAEL MANTLER
‘Songs’ featuring Gareth Davis
Vienna 2022 [no label, 1CD]
Live at Porgy & Bess, Vienna, Austria; October 17, 2022. Very good webstream.

Thanks to Lewojazz and Jazzrita for sharing the show at Dime.

+ + + + +

The Wire, September 2021:

“I have always considered myself an orchestral composer,” Vienna born trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler acknowledges in an interview. With Carla Bley, in 1965, he set up the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra in New York, a large ensemble vigorous and versatile enough to channel and give support to the torrential energies of improvising soloists such as Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri. Then, when Mantler and Bley established their independent record label Watt in the early 70s, its third release featured his piece Thirteen, a massive conception scored for two orchestras, plus connecting piano.

Eloquence, in Mantler’s terms, is never a matter of romantic flourishes or rhetorical excess. A discipline of austerity runs through his music even when the orchestration is at its most animated and intricate. Mantler has made no secret of the deep affinity he feels for the work of Samuel Beckett. Mantler’s music, like Beckett’s prose, is communicative without being conventionally expressive.

As a trumpeter and as an orchestral composer, Mantler to a certain extent shares those qualities and characteristics. He is a jazz musician who frequently seems to be working in an idiom more abstract and oblique than jazz. He does make compelling use of orchestral colour, yet despite the broad range of options available to him a repertoire of characteristic figures, alignments and accents persist. Cultivating these recurrent elements, Mantler manages to project an air of tension and an intensity that carries his own unmistakable imprint. Like Beckett, he is a virtuoso of cadence, his ear for the fall of a phrase is acute. And invariably the truly telling phrases do fall. Exultant ascents, joyous flights of the spirit are not Mantler’s natural trajectory

Beneath the agitated surface of his orchestral music there lurks a condition of virtual stasis, less a drone than an impasse, chords that loom in intractable blocks, going nowhere. His frequent use of repetition is never restful or hypnotic. Mantler is a master of anxiety and apprehensiveness. Dedicated listeners to cinematic music should certainly check out his work. His 1978 release Movies is a set of soundtracks for imaginary films.

+ + + + +

Lineage:
real time stream
Video Downloadhelper - Chrome > mp4 > VideoReDo TVSuite V6 > mp4

Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (256 kbps). As far as we can ascertain, these tracks have never been officially released on CD.

Please Do Not Hammer The Links. Due to the size of some of the files, please be very patient when downloading the tracks. It could be that the server was very busy. The tracks should still be around. Please try again later.

Kindly email us if you encounter persistent problems downloading the files. Also email us if you have any rarities you’d like to share with our readers.

“Songs” for bass clarinet and trumpet soloists, vocal and brass ensembles and percussion; with texts by Samuel Beckett, Ernst Meister, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Michael Mantler.

Track 01. Today 7:27
Track 02. Intolerance 4:43
Track 03. Business 5:22
Track 04. Pss/Something There 8:53
Track 05. Darker Than Night 10:20
Track 06. Eterno [Eternal] 10:47
Track 07. Vanita [Vanity]/E Senza Fiato [Motionless] 5:49
Track 08. Non Gritade Piu [Outcry No More] 3:54
58 mins

Marko Ivanovic - conductor

Michael Mantler - trumpet
Gareth Davis - bass clarinet

Vocal Ensemble:
Barbora Jiraskova - soprano
Jana Vondru - soprano
Elmaz Mrkvickova - alto
Annabelle Plum - alto
Jan Mikusek - tenor
Vojtech Sembera - baritone
Stepan Janousek - bass

Brass Ensemble/Percussion:
Ladislav Kozderka - trumpet
Jan Pribil - trumpet
Jakub Zidek - trombone
Jiri Tarantik - French horn
Jiri Genrt - tube
Martin Oprdsal - vibraphone, marimba

   Click here to order Michael Mantler releases.