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Michael Mantler

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Michael Mantler was born in Vienna in 1943 and is an Austrian trumpeter and composer of avant-garde jazz and contemporary music. In the early 1960s he studied trumpet and musicology at the Vienna academy of music and the university, and then at Berklee College in Boston. In 1964 he moved to New York and joined the Jazz Composers Guild, together with Roswell Rudd, Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor. In 1972 he founded the New Music Distribution Service, which served many independent labels for almost twenty years. With Carla Bley, to whom he was married from 1965 to 1991, he started WATT Records. Their daughter Karen Mantler also became a musician.

Music and breakthrough

Mantler recorded many solo albums, feeling himself more a composer than a bandleader. He set texts by writers such as Samuel Beckett to music, including on No Answer in 1974 and Many Have No Speech in 1987, with vocals by rock musicians such as Jack Bruce. On Something There in 1983 he worked with the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra. The album Movies from 1978 sounded, according to the critic Robert Christgau, like the ultimate soundtrack demo. From 1977 to 1985 he played in the Carla Bley Band.

Influence

In 1991 he moved to Europe and divided his time between Copenhagen and the south of France. He received commissions from European radio orchestras and wrote, among other works, the near-opera School of Understanding and One Symphony. His work shows how jazz, chamber music and literature can flow into one another, with rock singers in a classical setting.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to a track from Many Have No Speech and notice the singer delivering Beckett's text: how does the voice relate to the restrained accompaniment?

Discography

Studio albums

In School of Rock

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Categories: Artists