Michael Mantler

Born in Vienna, Austria on August 10, 1943, Michael Mantler is a contemporary jazz and avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer. He is known for co-founding The Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association and collaborating with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra in the United States. Michael Mantler studied trumpet and musicology at the Academy of Music before enrolling at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts in 1962. Relocating to New York two years later, he collaborated with pianist Cecil Taylor, who enlisted him in the Jazz Composers Guild. He formed the Jazz Realities quintet with Carla Bley, but after the group split in 1965, he co-founded The Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association (JCOA), a foundation intended to promote orchestral creation in jazz. Michael Mantler and Carla Bley, who married in 1965, continued their close collaboration and joined forces with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra (1970). Due to problems with independent distribution, formed the New Music Distribution Service to help get indie releases into stores. He and Carla Bley started their own label, Watt Records, and released the albums No Answer (1974), The Hapless Child (1976), Silence (1977), Movies (1978), More Movies (1980), Something There (1983), Alien (1985) and Many Have No Speech (1988). After divorcing Carla Bley in 1991, Michael Mantler relocated back to Europe and continued his journey through avant-garde and contemporary jazz. He collaborated with The Balanescu Quartet on Folly Seeing All This (1993) and continued to record with many different artists on subsequent albums including Songs and One Symphony (2000), Concertos (2008), Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update (2014), and Comment C’est (2017).

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