BRATTLEBORO-The Vermont Jazz Center will present Billy Childs, one of the leading pianists, composers, and arrangers of our time, on Sunday, Feb. 9, at 4 p.m.
Childs will perform with trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Ari Hoenig. They will be featuring material from the album The Winds of Change, which won a Grammy Award in 2023 for Best Instrumental Jazz Album of the Year.
Billy Childs has earned 17 Grammy nominations and six Grammy awards. He is also the recipient of Chamber Music America's Composer's Grant, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a music award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Several groups have commissioned Childs's orchestral compositions, including the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, and the American Brass Quintet.
Jazz critic Don Heckman, in a review of a live performance, wrote: "Words fail in an effort to describe the complexities and the subtleties of Childs's musical imagination, which is far-reaching. [...] Childs's works did not simply place genres side by side. Instead, they found a common, creative ground reminiscent of Rumi's 'community of the spirit.'"
Each of the 20 albums on which Childs is a leader presents thematic material that focuses on meaningful concepts and illuminates his intelligent and heartfelt approach.
He has appeared on hundreds of recordings as a side person with such luminaries as Wynton Marsalis, Yo-Yo Ma, Gladys Knight, Chris Botti, and the Headhunters. His recording, Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro, received a Grammy Award and features many other artists, including Alison Krauss, Renée Fleming, Wayne Shorter, and Diane Reeves.
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What makes Billy Childs a significant artist and earns him the respect and admiration of his peers? A combination of natural talent and hard-earned ability, his facility on the piano, and his capacity to play and write anything that comes to his brilliant mind. But it is also his attitude and his belief that the arts can be used as a healing force to forge relations with disparate people and cultures.
In an interview regarding a recently commissioned saxophone concerto he composed for Stephen Banks and the Minnesota Orchestra, Childs said: "We are part of a long continuum that is humanity. And whether it's art, politics or science, the legacy of humanity is enormous, and we are all part of it. I feel that I have to do my best to contribute positively to it to ensure harmony with the planet and with other people. And it's all part of this large continuum that we call art, we call music."
Childs deliberately shapes the arc of his arrangements to create interest and guide the listener through an emotional experience.
Childs has said his personal philosophy is that "a beautiful melody, a strong melody, is a profound statement. It resembles a great sentence. It's the most compelling feature of a lot of music." Once the audience is invested in a melody and can relate to it, Childs says, the composer is free to be as complex and layered as they want.
Along with melodicism, another strong feature of Childs's approach is his ability to blend seemingly disparate styles into one unified concept, thus making their juxtaposition sound natural. In his numerous recordings one finds clear examples of a variety of styles, including straight-ahead jazz, ballad, fusion, world music, and classical.
In an interview with the Detroit Symphony, Childs explained: "I want to create sound environments that are healing to the world." He says his aim is to synthesize many different genres, cultures, and styles into an organic whole "for the larger goal of creating good in the world."
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Childs was deeply influenced by the fusion sounds of Chick Corea's Return to Forever, Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters and Keith Emerson's work with Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The integration of fusion into Childs's repertoire is most apparent in his early recordings, such as 1995's "I've Known Rivers," where he included synthesizers, electric bass, and studio-enhanced drum sounds. In fact, Childs was chosen by Herbie Hancock in 1998 as a guest artist for the Return of the Headhunters album.
But the music Childs is producing now is quite different. Gone are the electronic effects of '80s fusion. His sound is distilled, but his vision is more expansive than ever.
On the piano or in a jazz setting, he still demonstrates his quick access to the bebop language and can play at blazing tempos, but much of his recent work is guided by commissions. In these pieces he varies the instrumentation to match the project, sometimes combining the full orchestral palette with a chorus and a jazz rhythm section. An example of this is "In the Arms of the Beloved," which was performed in 2024 by the Los Angeles Master Chorale.
Childs received his first full-fledged, classically oriented commission in the mid-1980s. Since 1996 he has fulfilled two to three commissions a year, creating major works for such prestigious ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, and The Kronos Quartet.
He successfully marries classical forms with jazz and improvised music to enhance the impact of his message rather than draw attention to style and technique.
His mentors in classical composition include composers Robert Linn (who studied with Darius Milhaud and Roger Sessions) and Morten Lauridsen, a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts.
In a 2012 interview with pianist George Colligan for his blog, JazzTruth, Childs elaborated on his use of classical techniques to enhance his expressive palette.
"One thing I dug about classical music is that because it had such command of a technical aspect of orchestration and all of these musical devices, it really lent itself to drama. You can really paint tonal pictures with it, with that command of orchestration and structure," he said. "You can create these cinemascapes, these tonal soundscapes, just by understanding how the masters did it. So that was really invaluable to me."
One concept that Childs has adapted from classical music and inserted into his jazz vocabulary is the freedom and breath that characterizes classical music's embodiment of time. He discussed this process in an interview with Chamber Music America, speaking of his work with the Dorian Wind Quintet. He said those musicians played in a way he hadn't experienced before: If someone came in late, everyone accommodated. Time in jazz, he said, is in a way external.
The quintet and he made up their own time, ebbing and flowing "according to the necessities of the moment." Reflecting on this process, he wondered why he hadn't brought this process to a jazz ensemble.
This approach infuses Childs's current writing. In some of his arrangements, the time intentionally breathes rather than adheres to a metronomic count.
This is most evident in The Winds of Change. In this recording, the concept of "time" is fluid and conversational.
In an interview with Jazziz magazine, Childs said when he listened again to the original recording of Kenny Wheeler's 1976 ECM album Gnu High. he was moved by the playing and interaction between Wheeler, Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette and felt inspired to bring that sense of space and connection into his own quartet.
"I thought that Ambrose (Akinmusire), Brian (Blade), and Scott (Colley) would be able to have similar conversations. [...] I didn't direct anybody to do anything because I wanted everybody to interpret the music and let the chips fall where they may."
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Childs will be bringing that aesthetic to the Vermont Jazz Center on Sunday, Feb. 9 with his East Coast quartet, featuring Jason Palmer, Matt Penman, and Ari Hoenig.
Palmer is quietly emerging as one of the most in-demand musicians of his generation. He has taught at the VJC's Summer Jazz Workshop, and he has performed with artists such as Roy Haynes, Herbie Hancock, Jimmy Smith (the organist), and Wynton Marsalis.
In addition to performing on over 40 albums as a sideman, Palmer has recorded 17 albums under his own name and has toured over 30 countries with saxophonists Greg Osby, Grace Kelly, and Matana Roberts. Palmer is currently assistant professor of ensembles at Berklee College of Music, jazz trumpet professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, and the Ravenscroft visiting jazz artist at Arizona State University. Palmer has also served as an assistant professor at Harvard University and has taught at the New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City.
Bassist Penman is originally from New Zealand. He moved to the U.S to attend Berklee College of Music and ended up as a first-call bassist in the New York City jazz scene. He is an established member of the SF Jazz Collective and is a co-founder of the James Farm quartet.
Penman was an artist-in-residence at the Brubeck Institute and served on the faculty of the Banff Workshop for Creative and Improvised Music. He is featured on over 100 recordings and has released four albums as a leader.
Hoenig, the group's drummer, attended the University of North Texas and William Patterson College. After landing a regular job with the legendary Philadelphia organist Shirley Scott, Hoenig worked regularly with heavy hitters in the NYC jazz scene including Jean Michel Pilc, Kenny Werner, and Chris Potter's Underground.
He has shared the stage with Herbie Hancock, Ivan Linz, Wynton Marsalis, and Toots Thielemans, among many others. Hoenig has recorded two self-produced solo drum CDs and leads his own quartet which has produced six recordings. In 2013, Hoenig's quartet won the BMW Welt [World] award in Munich, an international competition for best band led by a drummer.
Tickets for the Billy Childs Quartet at the Vermont Jazz Center are $25+ for general admission and may be purchased from vtjazz.org or [email protected]. Educational discounts are available. For tickets and information on access for disabilities, call the Vermont Jazz Center ticket line, 802-254-9088, ext. 1.
Eugene Uman is director of the Vermont Jazz Center. The Commons' Deeper Dive column gives artists, arts organizations, and other nonprofits elbow room to write in first person and/or be unabashedly opinionated, passionate, and analytical about their own creative work and events.
This Arts column was submitted to The Commons.