Ted Nash Big Band Debuts on Motéma Music September 9 With Presidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom, Large-Scale Jazz Compositions Inspired by Iconic Speeches of 20th Century World Leaders Including JFK, FDR, Churchill, Mandela and Nehru
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Special 2-CD Package Features Guest Readers Deepak Chopra, Glenn Close, Joe Lieberman, David Miliband, William vanden Heuvel, Sam Waterston, Andrew Young and Guest Artist Wynton Marsalis * Liner Notes by New York Times Best-Selling Authors Douglas Brinkley and Kabir Sehgal *
On September 9, 2016, GRAMMY® Award-nominated composer, arranger and multi- instrumentalist TED NASH will release his third large ensemble recording, Ted Nash Big Band – Presidential Suite: Eight Variations On Freedom. It is an ambitious, culturally trenchant album inspired by eight iconic political speeches of the 20th century, each centering on the essential human need for freedom. Marking Nash’s debut on Motéma Music and his 13th recording as a leader, the full suite features an overture plus eight movements, each preceded by inspirational words from a famed world leader: John F. Kennedy, Jawaharlal Nehru, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lyndon B. Johnson and Nelson Mandela.
Presidential Suite highlights Nash’s absolutely unique approach to this material. Nash transcribed the actual pitches and rhythms of the speeches and then transformed them into motifs, riffs and grooves, placing each into musical contexts that embrace the character, location and era of the speaker. Working with the world-class players of the Ted Nash Big Band, he wove the spaces for solos into these eight through-composed works, and his colleagues in the band did their own research into the meaning and history of the underlying speeches. They responded with solos of remarkable sensitivity and power. Nash writes:
When I hear a speech offered from the soul of a great person, I’m moved by the rhythm, the cadence, the pauses, what it communicates, and even the audience’s reaction. It’s like music. Great political speeches inspire us to believe we are capable of achieving great things together. It is my hope that when people listen to Presidential Suite, they will be reminded of not only how far we have come but also of how much we still have to do regarding human rights and freedom.
The astounding result is that every moment of Nash’s score is imbued with the essence – with the very sound – of the presidential speech that inspired it. Ultimately he transforms these impassioned words by inspirational leaders into music – our universal human language – and frees them from the pages of history.
It’s the genius of Ted Nash to realize that a stirring speech also has inherent musical qualities: lyrics, cadence, rhythm, and melody…we are given a chance to consider again the greatness and meaning of these speeches. And by reinterpreting these familiar speeches into music, Nash allows us to hear them afresh, in all the vigor and spontaneity with which they were first delivered. – From the liner notes by Douglas Brinkley and Kabir Sehgal.