Michael Mantler

Michael Mantler has exerted a profound influence on jazz through his activities as composer, trumpeter, record-label founder, and advocate for musicians' rights. In the early 1960s he pursued studies in musicology and trumpet at Vienna’s Academy of Music and at Vienna University before relocating to the United States and enrolling at Berklee. Arriving in New York in 1964, he performed with pianist Cecil Taylor and joined the Jazz Composers Guild alongside Taylor, trombonist Roswell Rudd, saxophonist Archie Shepp, and additional colleagues. The organization arose from collective efforts to secure better working conditions, royalty accountability, and improvements in booking practices and overall professional circumstances.

Mantler subsequently assembled a large ensemble with pianist and composer Carla Bley, whom he later married. Following the Guild’s dissolution, he toured Europe with Bley and saxophonist Steve Lacy in the mid-1960s and participated in establishing the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association (JCOA), a nonprofit entity created to present, record, and commission orchestral jazz works. He appeared on Bley’s A Genuine Tong Funeral alongside Gary Burton and orchestra in 1967, then released a two-record JCOA collection of his own compositions in 1968 that featured Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Rudd, and other prominent soloists; the set received widespread acclaim from both domestic and international jazz critics.

Mantler conducted performances at New York’s Electric Circus and contributed to bassist Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra album in 1969. Between 1970 and 1971 he supervised the recording of Bley’s expansive three-disc work Escalator Over the Hill, which incorporated additional contributions from leading instrumental figures. In 1972 he launched the New Music Distribution Service (NMDS) as an independent JCOA division responsible for distributing recordings by JCOA-associated artists. The following year he and Bley established Watt Works, a label intended exclusively for issuing their own projects.

Mantler constructed a recording facility near Woodstock in 1975 and obtained composition grants from the Creative Artists Program Service, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ford Foundation’s recording-publishing initiative. Although the JCOA and NMDS later encountered insurmountable financial difficulties and ceased operations, Mantler continued an active career that encompassed tours with Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, performances and recordings with the Carla Bley Band, and, extending into the twenty-first century, numerous ECM releases featuring an eclectic array of collaborators such as Robert Wyatt, Marianne Faithfull, Jack Bruce, Chris Spedding, Kevin Coyne, Karen Mantler, Don Preston, John Greaves, and others.

During the twenty-first century Mantler focused on integrating his longstanding classical and jazz compositional approaches. Representative projects from this period include Songs and One Symphony (2000), School of Understanding (Sort of an Opera) (2001), Hide and Seek (2007)—the incidental score for a Paul Auster play, with Wyatt and Susi Hyldgaard providing vocals—and Concertos (2008), which featured Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, trombonist Roswell Rudd, and guitarist Bjarne Roupe.

After an extended recording hiatus spent working with European orchestras, appearing at festivals, fulfilling commissions, and composing, Mantler returned to ECM with The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra: Update. In a live club environment he revisited earlier material together with previously unrecorded pieces, re-orchestrating and rearranging the music while performing trumpet alongside guitarist Bjarne Roupe, the Nouvelle Cuisine Big Band under Christoph Cech, and the radio.string.quartet.vienna; the album appeared in November 2014. Three years later he issued Comment C’est on ECM. Explaining the project, Mantler stated that he was “no longer able to ignore overwhelming and outrageous recent world events.” Abandoning abstract composition, he addressed contemporary social ills directly; the album’s texts, sung by French-born vocalist Himiko Paganotti, confront what he termed “the all-pervading environment of hatred, greed and corruption.” Mantler again played trumpet, supported by the Max Brand Ensemble conducted by Christoph Cech. The works were conceived as responses to recent historical developments, with individual compositions addressing war, terrorism, hostages, migration, poverty, fear, and the broader dismal condition of the world.