Career: United States
Mantler was born in Vienna, Austria. He went to the United States in 1962 to study music, and after early activities within the New York avant garde community, including work with Cecil Taylor and the Jazz Composer's Guild, he was a founder of the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association aka JCOA, a non-profit organisation to commission, perform, and record new compositions for jazz orchestra.
The problems of independently distributing the orchestra's record label led him to form the New Music Distribution Service (as a division of JCOA) in 1972, an organisation which was to serve many independent labels for almost twenty years.
He then had a personal and professional relationship with Carla Bley, to whom he was married from 1967–1992, and with whom he had a daughter, Karen Mantler, now also a musician in her own right. Eventually Bley and he established their own company, WATT — a record label, recording studio, and publisher. He toured and recorded extensively with the Carla Bley Band as well as occasionally with his own live performance projects.
Mantler recorded many solo albums with varying instrumentation and personnel, emphasizing his work as a composer rather than as a band leader. Appearing infrequently live, he mostly concentrated on composing and recording. Among others, he recorded an album with the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra plus soloists (Something There), and several albums of songs using the words of writers as diverse as Samuel Beckett (No Answer), Harold Pinter (Silence), and Edward Gorey (The Hapless Child).
Various commissions from and performances with European orchestras followed, including work at Swedish Radio, North and West German Radio, the Lille Opera, and Danish Radio. His 1987 recording, Many Have No Speech, an album of songs in English, German, and French, was based on the poetry of Samuel Beckett, Ernst Meister, and Philippe Soupault. It was written for chamber orchestra, trumpet and guitar soloists, and additionally, for the singing voices of Rock musicians Jack Bruce, Marianne Faithfull, as well as Robert Wyatt.
Read more about this topic: Michael Mantler
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united and/or states:
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—”indoctrination” we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“... the yearly expenses of the existing religious system ... exceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown!... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“I would like to be the first ambassador to the United States from the United States.”
—Barbara Mikulski (b. 1936)