Jack Straw Productions
4261 Roosevelt Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105
FREE

Jack Straw Productions and Washington Composers Forum present Composer Spotlight, a series of talks and performances by composers, musicians, and scholars of new and innovative music every second Wednesday of each month. For more information about Composer Spotlight artists and the series, click here.

Order Out of Chaos—Composing for an Improvising Tentet

Wed, July 9, 7:30pm

Tom Varner will discuss and play sections from his new work "Heaven and Hell," recently recorded at Jack Straw, and premiered at Seattle Art Museum, that was five years in the making. This piece was begun at the MacDowell Artist Colony, and mixes classical chamber music with "free" and "jazz" improvisation.  Varner will plan to have some of his tentet members on hand to provide musical examples and interludes.

Varner has distinguished himself as both the foremost jazz French horn player of his generation and also as a highly creative arranger breaking new ground in small-group jazz. Influenced on his instrument by the great Julius Watkins (with whom he studied privately), Varner got a degree from the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Ran Blake, George Russell, and Jaki Byard, which helps explain his music's eclectic character, which thrives on stylistic crossbreeding.

His compositions can partake of the serialism of Berg and Webern as well as Thelonious Monk's angular bop structures, Ornette Coleman's pantonal melodicism, and funky 12-bar blues. Varner has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was a Down Beat Critics Poll Top Ten in 1983 and from 1998 to 2006, and was a pollwinner in Jazz Times (1990, 1993). -Steve Holtje