There are millions of musical stories in the naked city. This is one of them. This is not the story of contrived tragedy, the sad story of the life of a facile celebrity, created the way interest in nearly everything is created in the current culture - through hype and marketing. Though the lines between substantive art and commerce-entertainment are often blurred, there are still artists who are committed to exploration and emotional, spiritual and mental uplift. Paul Nash - a jazz guitarist, a composer who worked in various styles of jazz and classical music, and a music educator - is such an artist and this is his story. It is a story of facing sickness and death due to a brain tumor and deciding to define his life’s legacy through music. It is also the story of Julia Reinhart, a great second, a dedicated collaborator, and the caretaker of his legacy.

Paul Nash grew up in the Bronx, New York in a musical family. His mother played classical piano, so the apartment frequently resounded with Bach, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms. His sister was an avid collector of jazz records in high school, so he heard Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Yusef Lateef, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans and many others. After attending Berklee School of Music, he went to California and earned degrees in jazz composition and classical composition at Mills College. While there, he created the 10-piece Paul Nash Ensemble in 1977. Later, he helped to organize the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra, a jazz ensemble that explored the merging of jazz and classical music. In 1990, he moved to New York City and founded the Manhattan New Music Project.

Ms. Reinhart started out as an aspiring musician. She studied formally at the Winterthur Music Conservatory in her native Switzerland. She started with classical harp lessons at age six and went on to study guitar and saxophone. Later she added piano and singing to the mix. She performed in bands - mostly rock bands - semi-professionally all the way through college where she studied Electrical Engineering, focusing on acoustics and digital signal processing.

After college, she decided to try her hand at dealing with corporate America to learn about business. She discovered in this process that all she really cared about was music, so she decided to merge business and music by getting a degree in Music Management at New York University. “Here in New York, I met so many artists who were far more talented as performers than me, but really struggled to wrap their head around the business end of matters. I felt I could make a bigger impact on the music scene as a manager then by swelling the ranks of hopeful performers.”

[Kirby] When did you start working with Paul Nash?

[Julia Reinhart] I met Paul in early 2002, when he was looking for someone to help him get more engagements for his jazz orchestra at the Manhattan New Music Project (MNMP). I worked with him until his death in January 2005 and have since taken over his organization to continue his work. Paul’s CDs were the first full-length CD projects that I worked on over here in America. Paul used to be his own producer but by the time he got into the studio to record Jazz Cycles and Avant Noir, (because of his brain tumor) he couldn’t read his own music anymore and struggled to express his thoughts to the musicians. So, he asked me to help him out.

[Kirby] What was it about him and his music that drew you to him?

[Julia Reinhart] I love jazz of all kinds and have a lot of respect for artists who are trying to find their own way to push the boundaries of what they do and the genre they work in. Too many people just try to be the next so-and-so instead of trying to develop a deep understanding of their own creative inspiration and trying to define their own artistic identity from their own creative output. Paul had a very strong vision of who he was and what he was trying to do as an artist and that deeply impressed me.

[Kirby] Mr. Nash’s well-digested influences and subsequent originality shine through on all the compositions on these two records. Jazz Cycles consists of thematically linked pieces that comprise a whole unified musical work, which takes the listener on Nash’s personal odyssey through the various styles and schools of jazz he explored over a period of thirty years. Avant Noir is a collection of pieces that highlight his penchant for ’60’s “New Thing” jazz. As he said in an interview in the publication All About Jazz, “My music has a more obvious debt to Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, lgor Stravinsky, Carla Bley and other innovators with a reverence for complexity and collage. In terms of jazz… I have always loved the dense, concerted harmonies (in) Gil Evans’ horn arranging. Perhaps more importantly, I have incorporated the larger encompassing statements of Charles Mingus who, among other things, integrated several tunes (and) tempi… within a single composition. All of my substantial jazz pieces integrate longer, multidimensional compositional forms and strategically incorporate free form improvisational elements.”

Describe the journey from the initial decision to record these works to the release of the CDs.

[Julia Reinhart] It really started when Paul began to realize in 2004 that he most likely wouldn’t survive his brain tumor. He had been busy writing music for a few months when he told me he wanted to go ahead and record as much as he could. “I really need this for my own mental sanity,” he said at the time. I fully understood, since he had been throwing himself into work as a way to cope with his illness ever since he had received the initial diagnosis. Within a week of his first diagnosis he was operated upon to remove the first tumor. Three days after being released from the hospital he came back to the office, eager to do things. So, when he mentioned the recording projects to me, I asked him to show me what he had to record. So we went over the pieces he was working on and picked a bunch of works he felt were already in good shape to get started on recording. I then rounded up the band, set up the studio, and off we went. This was in April of 2004. The first record we worked on was what later took the name of Avant Noir.

[Kirby] The songs on Avant Noir are filled with signature moments that highlight the best in Nash’s music. “Ballad for Bill Evans” recalls the slinky structural formalism of Evans’ compositions, and the emotional lushness of Gil Evans’ work with Miles Davis. Nash, however, has a distinctive soulfulness and jazzy cool that, in keeping with the theme of the album, recalls smoky bars in the circa 1958 New York of John Cassavetes’ Johnny Staccato or the noir televison show Naked City, especially in the tenor saxophone solo work by Adam Kolker. The cut “L.I.Q.” has the sly intensity of early ’70’s detective shows, with more of the dynamic stateliness found in, for instance, Duke Ellington’s soundtrack for Otto Preminger’s dark thriller Anatomy of a Murder. This song features blazing solos by trumpeter Jack Walrath and Kolker on soprano sax. Grisha Alexiev provides driving drum statements throughout the piece. Though highly composed, this song, like most of the pieces here, leave ample room for individual virtuosity, i.e., the cats get to blow, daddy-o.

The drums really get to have their say on the cut “What the Drum Said” which is a sly homage to Ellington’s “The Drum is a Woman.” Alexiev starts out with a rhythmic statement that is answered by the horn section and fuzzed out guitar by Vic Juris. Saxophone, trumpets, flutes and piano pick up on the rhythmic motifs of the drums and enhance and develop them, all the while supporting and cajoling Alexiev’s drumming. This early section runs like a sonic river that empties out into pool with floating solos by Juris and soprano sax, courtesy of Bruce Williamson and Chris Komer’s French Horn.

“Time and Motion” combines Nash’s interests in Western classical and modernist music and jazz. The opening theme, played on horns and supported by piano, a dancing bass and smoothly swinging drums, is jazz-like in its use of the blues. The rhythmic shift in the piece’s second section, along with the ascending, bright harmonics of the piano, reminds one Zappa’s jazz period in the early seventies. This textural swirl provides the sonic bedding for another fine alto sax solo by Bruce Williamson. Though loose and improvised-sounding when first heard, the interlocking horn, piano, bass and drum patterns repeat with the intricacy of a classical fugue or Ellingtonian jazz, providing the perfect setting for Walrath’s trumpet solo. The ending cadenza is a slower, more stately variation of the opening theme, with less blues emphasis and more controlled dissonance.

Read the full interview by Mark Kirby with Julia Reinhart on Paul Nash’s Legacy
http://www.musicdish.com/mag/?id=12002

For more on Paul Nash, visit http://www.myspace.com/paulnashlegacy