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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