 JANUARY 28 • 2021 | 31

WIKIMEDIA

ARTS&LIFE
MUSIC

Sophisticated 
Music

New CD, Bernstein 
Reimagined, features 
variations in jazz styling.

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
F

lavio Chamis, who worked 
with composer-conductor-pi-
anist Leonard Bernstein in 
the 1980s, has entered a new pre-
sentation medium beyond lecturing 
on the Jewish heritage and religious 
commitments they had discussed 
while traveling together. 
Chamis, who was Bernstein’s 
conducting assistant, has written the 
liner notes for a new album planned 
to introduce an innovative direction 
to Bernstein’s original music — vari-
ations in jazz styling.
Bernstein Reimagined, with a 
release date of Jan. 29, features the 
Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks 
Orchestra performing lesser-known 
pieces as arranged by five jazz 
artists working independently. It 
was produced by the Manchester 
Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh.
Jay Ashby, Darryl Brenzel, Scott 
Silbert, Mike Tomaro and Steve 
Williams added their musical 
approaches to pieces taken from 
Bernstein’s compositions expressed 
through symphony, opera, musical 
theater and film. 
“These are the very serious piec-
es of Bernstein and not the ones 
you would think would be used on 
a jazz recording,” said Chamis, a 
composer-conductor who teaches 
about the architecture of music at 
Carnegie Mellon University and the 
University of Pittsburgh. 
“There are other musicians who 

took Bernstein’s pieces and did jazz 
improvisations, but those are the 
pieces that sound jazzy. These are 
not the obvious choices — so the 
more I listen, the more I find new 
things. That is the spirit of jazz.” 
The Smithsonian Jazz 
Masterworks Orchestra, an 18-piece 
orchestra-in-residence 
at the Smithsonian’s 
National Museum of 
American History, 
was founded in 
1990 as authorized 
by Congress, and it 
became the nation’s 
only museum with 
its own jazz orches-
tra. Their Bernstein 
recording project was 
launched in 2018 as part of the cen-
tennial celebration of Bernstein’s life.
Among the sounds in the reinter-
preted pieces are Silbert’s rapid-fire 
shifts in tempo and dynamics 
brought to “Times Square” from 
the Broadway musical On The Town, 
Williams’ reggae vibes introduced 
into “Waltz” from Divertimento for 
Orchestra written for the Boston 
Symphony Orchestra, and Tomaro’s 
improvised section for soprano 
saxophone and piano added to the 
“Postlude to Act I” from the opera A 
Quiet Place. 
The only piece that has a Jewish 
connection, according to Chamis, 
is Brenzel’s joyful arrangement of 

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