ISJAC | International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers

International Society for Jazz Arrangers & Composers

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The International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers is FREE and OPEN to all who practice and love the art of jazz composition and arranging.

We invite you to please register your association with ISJAC IMMEDIATELY to ensure you are informed of all upcoming events & opportunities while documenting the power of our collective voice.

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News

  • 2021 ISJAC/USF Prize Winners Announcement

    The International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers (ISJAC) is thrilled to announce the 2021 winners of the prestigious ISJAC/USF Owen Prize in Jazz Composition and the inaugural ISJAC/USF Prize for Emerging Black Composers. All three winning compositions will be performed virtually by an acclaimed professional jazz orchestra at ISJAC’s Un[chart]ed Territory (March 18-20). Stay tuned for upcoming details!

  • 2020 ISJAC Giving Campaign – Can You Help?

    The 2020 ISJAC Giving Campaign will run from Monday October 19th through Thursday October 29th. This annual event is the primary fundraising initiative of our organization and helps provide the financial resources for our programming.

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Artist Blog

  • Emilio Solla: Jazz Composition, a non-formal approach

    When JC invited me to publish something in this blog, it took me quite a while to figure out what to write about that would be interesting for a forum visited by many colleagues who already have their own voice as composers, and decided that maybe (just maybe) the most interesting thing I could share is my own methodology and approach, being that my musical background is (for good and for bad) far from that of musicians who have studied and developed their language inside the usual jazz boundaries. I got into music through long years of classical piano and composition as well as studies in counterpoint, orchestration, etc. When jazz harmony and piano blew my mind at around 17, I had already developed a deep interest for longer forms and the eternal problem of finding the right amount of variation of all the possible elements and enough motif development so that the piece will move forward and stay interesting, but not so much that it could end up being a collage of so many ideas that would conspire against unity and coherence. I guess that many of our first compositions suffer from that all-you-can-tell-in-5-minutes syndrome, right? Through studying with different teachers (and most importantly with the Argentine Gabriel Senanes) I’ve developed a certain protocol that I try to use almost always, sometimes more rigorously than others, which is based on a non-formal approach to the piece, that is, you do not write in order. Again, we are not talking of a 32-bar song here (in which case you certainly might want to write bar 5 before you meet bar 6) but of more complex, ambitious forms. There is, of course the exception of you being a W.A. Mozart-type (who according to the legend could write the whole piece from beginning to end, in ink, including the orchestration). If this is your case, please go back to Netflix, you certainly will get nothing out of this article, but if you are (as yours truly) a mortal, average composer with some good ideas once in a while which need a lot of deep thought and work until they become a final piece, then you might want to read on and consider adding any of these concepts to your inventing routines. First of all, eureka, we have an IDEA. That can be anything at all: a melody, a chord progression, just a rhythm, or even a form…anything that you use as a starting point. (You are looking at a pyramid in Egypt, and decide you will write a piece: you have no pitch, no time yet, nothing, but you have a frame: a big triangle, climax exactly at 50% of the piece…is it a palindrome? Does the peak in the middle represent pitch? Or orchestral density? Your call, it is YOUR pyramid now, nobody else’s!) Ideas tend to be short, and volatile: make a note! Any piece of paper will do, and you add one more to your archive of ideas, normally an old box or folder full of forgotten and torn pieces of paper. For mysterious reasons, some of those papers keep lingering in your mind with enough persistence so that you will grab that one from 4/11/19 and put it in the piano stand. Let’s say you have a collection of pitches (a melody germ), then you are missing all the other elements (which is the harmony? which is the rhythm? who plays it?) and, yes,…some more length (4 bars is too short even for our Instagram-can’t-focus-on-anything brains). Sing out the melody a few times, see if it reveals more clues about where she wants to go (sorry for the “she” here, melody is feminine in Spanish. And it is too important to call it “it”, you feel me?) Maybe you moved to 8 bars, maybe still only 4…no worries, you’ve just completed the first segment of the compositional trip, this one was short and easy: just “downloading” the idea from…from…wish we knew, right!? Or maybe we do not want to know, like we do not want to know how the magician produced that pigeon out of the empty hat. A personal word about the IDEA: while some composers talk about creating a motif out of nothing, just grabbing four pitches at random for example, and while I swear I respect any approach to the creative act you might choose (like my friend Ignacio who combines his pink shoes with a yellow tie and likes it), I personally could never write any good music out of such a start, other than maybe some school exercise. Can you cook with whatever is left in the fridge? Sure thing, but I doubt you can compare that meal to the one that started with you in Ironbound, NJ, and suddenly realizing you are close to Seabras, the Portuguese supermarket, where they sell the real North Atlantic octopus with which you could…etc.) You might argue: the things you had in the fridge were also great quality ingredients, then, why the difference? Well, this is the difference: the second menu was born out of an idea that came NATURALLY to you…and who knows why those ideas’ genetic material is so much richer, personal and other good things! Let’s go for a glass of wine and dive into this, your treat! So, what now? By now the notes have tentative durations (never final, just for now!) Time to harmonize maybe? If an initial harmony was part of the combo, I write it down on top of the melody, if not, I go for the most obvious one or one that sounds instantly good, trying not think too much, it is not yet time for corrections! We are about to embark in the second segment of our composing trip: ACCUMULATION. We do not praise, we do not judge, we do not reject, we do not choose or make any decision: we accumulate possibilities, not knowing where, when or if they will be used at all, and we …

  • Amir ElSaffar: Beyond the Other Shore – the Rivers of Sound Orchestra and Transcultural Music Making

    Amir ElSaffar talks about blurring the lines between composers, conductors, and players in his cross-cultural ensemble. He also discusses scales, tuning, and other practicalities inside of his ensemble and how that opened up a new world of possibilities.

ISJAC’s Un[chart]ed Territory – March 18-20, 2021

ISJAC is pleased to present Un[chart]ed Territory in March 2021. While not a replacement for the immensely successful Jazz Composers’ Symposium (postponed to 2022), Un[chart]ed Territory seeks to inspire, motivate, offer our members a chance to showcase their own work, facilitate conversation, and serve as a conduit for creativity and collaboration – much like our flagship in-person conference. Un[chart]ed Territory will run three consecutive evenings (plus a Saturday afternoon) in March 2021 with both synchronous and asynchronous sessions that include the celebration of our recent Owen Prize for Jazz Composition and Prize for Emerging Black Composers winners, the induction of the 2021 ISJAC Hall of Fame class, all-star panel discussions, networking opportunities, chats with elite guest composer artists, a very special pre-recorded capstone performance, and a creative opportunity for you to have conversations about your recent project or check out the new work/research of other composers and arrangers that you admire.

Register here: https://hopin.com/events/un-chart-ed-territory

ISJAC is a community-centered organization that offers much love and support to composers in a nurturing and positive environment.

Jihye Lee

The symposium brings jazz composers from across the world together in a way that nothing else does. I feel an incredible warmth and spark talking shop with other passionate writers and creators. Something like this is really special.

Zachary Bornheimer

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