Music of Anthony Coleman

Great artists give free concerts at New England Conservatory—simply because they teach here.

Pianist/composer/improviser Anthony Coleman will perform solo on piano and/or organ, and will introduce new works he has created for various chamber configurations.

Coleman has provided the notes on this page.

Aioli finds Coleman alone at the piano.

Flaubert/Sofa/Sentence for electric organ, alto saxophone, objects, voice, and percussion pairs Coleman with his former students Ashley Paul and Eli Keszler.

Quelquefois, quand je me trouve vide, quand l’expression se refuse, quand, après avoir griffonné de longues pages, je découvre n’avoir pas fait une phrase, je tombe sur mon divan et j’y reste hébété dans un marais intérieur d’ennui. Je me hais et je m’accuse de cette démence d’orgueil qui me fait haleter après la chimère.
—Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet - Croisset, Saturday, April  24, 1852

(Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride which makes me pant after a chimera.)

Eli Keszler and Ashley Paul are (I’m very proud to say) my former students. Since leaving school, they have embarked upon the creation of a body of work (together and separately) that has already had wide, even global impact. Even though we do a lot of projects together, I’ve wanted to write something specifically for the three of us for some time.

Matter of Operation is written for Survivors Breakfast, the Contemporary Improvisation student ensemble that Coleman coaches.

Survivors Breakfast! I remember once, long ago (Google isn’t helping) reading an article about the Mark Morris Dance Company where Morris spoke glowingly about how wonderfully, absurdly mismatched his company was. I love that image. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of an ensemble’s functioning as a kind of paradigmatic society where, as Terry Eagleton says, writing about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, individuals are “not wholly active, shapers of their individual lives, nor wholly passive, parts of a larger design in which they are merely manipulated objects; human life is in some way an interpenetration of the two—a fusion of spontaneity and aware responsibility”.

I’ve aimed at this for a long time. All my fascination with Ellington and his band, with the films of John Ford and Preston Sturges and their stock companies—trying to find that balance. Well, now I have my weekly work with Survivors Breakfast, and I feel like some Bizarro World version of Haydn at Eszterhazy!

As a passionate misreader (in every way you can imagine) of John Cage and his work, I have taken his pet phrase (originally from Ananda Coomaraswamy) “art should imitate nature in her manner of operation” and messed it up a bit.

Bassist Sean Conly and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi join Coleman for a group of pieces for piano trio written in memory of Coleman's teacher/mentor Jaki Byard, who was a hugely influential teacher in his time at NEC. The titles—Hollis '69, Good Morning, Feb. 11, 1999, Hollis '69 II, and A Day—refer to key dates in Coleman's musical life and in the life of his mentor Byard.

Jaki Byard was my most important mentor. I met him when I was 12 years old.He was my principal piano teacher. And it was due to his influence that I came to study at NEC.

I went to him because I was already interested in Ragtime Piano, and was beginning to become interested in Early Jazz piano (East Coast Stride, as well as the music of Jelly Roll Morton). I was also aware enough, however, to realize that I wouldn’t always want to express myself solely through archaic genres. When I heard Jaki play, I was amazed by his ability to leap from the oldest to the newest styles of Jazz in a brilliantly kaleidoscopic way. But I was also struck by how he made all of these genre references his own. His playing is instantly recognizable.

Once at NEC, I had gradually less and less contact with Jaki. We would meet occasionally, and I also wrote for his school Big Band. He was always friendly, and never expressed anything negative about my “defection” to the Composition Department (a whole epic story in itself). But I wonder if something about this secretly hurt him. He had been incredibly generous with me, taking me to sessions and introducing me to Earl Hines and Charles Mingus. In many ways, he treated me like a peer.

His violent death came as a terrible shock.

Hollis, Queens was where Jaki lived and worked and taught. 1969 was my first year of High School, when I really was able to start taking this Musical Life seriously. Feb. 11, 1999 was the day Jaki was killed.

Anthony Coleman also performs on a Jaki Byard tribute concert at NEC on March 8.