COMPOSERS: Mark Hetzler
LABELS: Summit
PERFORMER: Mark Hetzler
CATALOGUE NO: DCD 331
The notion of the heritage shared by jazz and (specifically) American classical music is central to MARK HETZLER’s American Voices (in the artistic, rather than literal sense, as this disc is primarily a trombone recital), in which pieces by Ives, Cowell, Gershwin, Barber, Bernstein and Copland unfussily co-exist with works by the likes of Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheny.
There are areas of the repertoire which quite naturally occupy the territory between classical music and jazz. One such area is cabaret music. I’d include here the songs of Kurt Weill, as likely to be sung by a jazz vocalist as a classical recitalist, and also the remarkable cabaret songs of William Bolcom, a former student of Messiaen and an appreciator of Gershwin, who sets texts by Arnold Weinstein.