This album was born with an alluring invitation. Several years after
seeing a memorable performance by the Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra with tenor sax
great George Garzone and legendary trombonist/ composer Bob Brookmeyer at the
Berklee Performance Center, Italian trombonist Massimo Morganti arranged for
Inserto to come to Italy for a series of workshops with his formidable Colours
Jazz Orchestra. Inserto quickly struck up a close bond with the band, returned
the following year for a series of gigs, and ended up arranging a consistently
inspired set of material for the world class ensemble, music documented on Home
Away From Home, slated for release in the US by the German label Neuklang
Records on June 9, 2015.
An associate professor of jazz composition at Berklee College of
Music, she's the leader of the acclaimed Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra, which
features some of Boston's most potent improvisers. As a protégé of the late
great Bob Brookmeyer, who's featured on her 2006 debut album Clairvoyance,
Inserto has won numerous awards and commissions while producing a gloriously
inventive body of work. Full of dynamic movement, striking voicings and lush
harmonies, Inserto's imaginative writing puts her at the forefront of the
contemporary orchestral jazz scene.
Inserto's third release, Home Away From Home, introduces a vivid and
varied collection of pieces that she's never recorded before. Her familiarity
with Colours is evident throughout. The album opens with her "You're
Leaving? But I Just Got Here," dedicated to former Berklee Jazz
Composition Chair, Ken Pullig, which proceeds from a cheeky dialogue between
drummer Massimo Manzi and soprano saxophonist Simone La Maida into a
drum-directed band confab and deftly interwoven soprano/trumpet conversation.
The Harvard Jazz Band commissioned her sensuous but abstract recomposition of
Joe Henderson's standard "Recorda Me," which hints at the original
melody while setting it in a new alluring harmonic framework.
Inserto's sumptuous ballad "La Danza Infinita," the album's
centerpiece, showcases Morganti's legato phrasing and rich, singing tone, while
the ensemble displays its exceptional cohesion.
She closes the album with "Subo," a jaunty, Latin-inflected
tune she arranged and recomposed from a tune written by Boston trumpet ace Dan
Rosenthal, a longtime member of the Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra.
In many ways, Inserto provided a good deal of the inspiration for the
creation of Colours. Morganti was studying at Berklee for a year when he caught
the performance by Inserto's orchestra with special guests Garzone and
Brookmeyer. He decided he wanted to create something similar back home in
Ancona, a central Italian port on the Adriatic coast.
Founded in 2002, Colours
draws on some of the finest players on Italy's vibrant jazz scene
and has
collaborated with jazz stars like Brookmeyer, Ryan Truesdell, Bob Mintzer, Maria
Schneider, and Kenny Wheeler (who's featured on the band's critically hailed
2009 debut album Nineteen Plus One).
"Massimo writes for Colours, but he mainly tries to have guest
artists come in for the orchestra to play their music," Inserto says. "It's
a great band, a modern big band that's always looking for interesting
material."
Born in Singapore, Inserto was 14 when her family relocated to
California, and within a year had settled in the San Francisco Bay Area's East
Bay, where she was well prepared to take advantage of the region's extensive
jazz educational resources. Inserto had started taking piano lessons as a
child, and jumped into music at her Catholic church.
"I was very active in the church choir, and they this one band
that had a little more modern sound," Inserto recalls. "I was playing
the organ, and there was lot of improvising that would go on before the service
started. A lot of our music only had lead sheets, and I'd make up stuff to go
with them."
Introduced to jazz via the Manhattan Transfer, she learned to read
chords from a book of Disney tunes, and soon started substituting her own chord
choices to make the songs sound more interesting. By the time she started
Clayton Valley High School in the East Bay city of Concord, Inserto was
obsessed with music, playing piano in various school ensembles, including the
jazz band. She discovered Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner and other piano giants, while
continuing to study classical piano. She was also an avid member of the
award-winning Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps, playing mallet percussion.
Inserto's jazz education took a quantum leap when she attended a weeklong
Berklee camp held in Los Angeles "where I learned voicings," she
says. "Around that time I also started writing for the school band and the
marching band. I got hired to write for the Blue Devils "B" Corps,
writing all these mallet percussion ensemble pieces."
She attended Los Medanos College's respected jazz program for several
years and then transferred to Cal State Hayward (now Cal State East Bay), where
she thrived under the tutelage of trombonist/arranger Dave Eshelman, who has
mentored several generations of exceptional Bay Area jazz musicians. He
recorded several of her pieces with the CSUH Big Band. Encouraged to apply to New
England Conservatory by saxophonist and NEC professor Allan Chase, who's now a
member of her Jazz Orchestra, Inserto was drawn to NEC by the presence of
Brookmeyer. "I studied two full years with him," she says. "I
was writing from a piano player's point of view, and he got me into more
melodic writing, developing these long lines. After NEC I continued to study
with him and he really took me on as a mentor."
While Brookmeyer's influence is evident, Inserto has honed an
independent musical identity writing and arranging for her orchestra, as well
as numerous other ensembles that have commissioned her. She released her second
album featuring the band and special guest George Garzone, Muse, in 2008,
cementing her reputation as a composer and arranger of exceptional acuity. She
has no plans of giving up the Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra, but after her
collaboration with Colours it couldn't be clearer why Italy is truly a home
away from home.
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