Composer and conductor Vince Mendoza discusses his new album Freedom Over Everything featuring a new song cycle “To the Edge of Longing” written for Julia Bullock.  The recording also features the commissioned “Concerto for Orchestra” from the Czech National Symphony Orchestra with whom Mendoza has worked with for the last several years.   

Colleen Kennedy: Where are we talking from today?

Vince Mendoza: I'm in Cologne in Germany. You just missed the explosion of church bells coming from the cathedral that's across the street from my hotel over here. I'm working with the Cologne WDR  radio for two weeks. It's our second week here. And so I'm just so happy to get out of the house at this point.

CK: Things are starting to open back up. Wonderful!

VM: They are, and actually with this organization [WDR Funkhausorchester Köln], the musicians have  been working over the last year, which is good news for us because they've all been playing their instruments steadily over the last year. But they still haven't had public concerts, but we did a live stream recently.

CK: Can you talk about the inspiration for Freedom Over Everything that was released on July 3?  It's very political, very of the moment.

VM: Freedom Over Everything is the title that comes from the rap that's written by MC Black Thought that was integrated into the last movement of “Concerto for Orchestra,” a concerto commissioned in 2016 from the Czech National Symphony. They wanted something that would feature their soloists but also something that would ask for a bit of improvisation, some elements of jazz and a rhythm section in it. So, even that is a prescription that's somewhat different from your average concerto for orchestra. But as I started writing it, in 2016, we were in the throes of the election of the person that became President 45. I noticed this discord, confusion, and a clamor of so many voices, and also the loss of the grasp of truth. For the first time in my long career of composing, I realized that I could not compose and separate myself from what I was feeling.

When I started to design the structure of this concerto, I embraced this theme that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. evoked: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The arc of the concerto could start with the discord and noise meeting with a certain consolation—protests hitting the streets, meditations of some sort—and then the last movement would be an essay on justice and unity. In the meantime, when we recorded this piece, we got to the end of the cycle of recording the orchestra and we made some changes to the structure. And then 2020 happened, with the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests, and all the rest of this fitful year. My goal to end this arc of the concerto on a note of justice became a question mark instead.  

When I asked MC Black Thought to contribute the rap to the last movement, he started writing around the time of George Floyd’s murder and the protests, so this rap has a decidedly different focus than what I had originally anticipated. It’s an interesting evolution from how I had envisioned the piece to culminate. And in a way it embraces that sort of jazz sensibility that we can design an arc but things are always going to be changing. The fifth movement of the concerto is a perfect example of that.

CK: Does the concerto then capture this pivotal moment, this epoch of unrest?

VM: The concerto is really about my emotional reaction to what has been happening in our country, and structured with an aspiration for a just resolution to the problems in our country. But whenever we try to go into that direction we realize that we're not done yet. And I think it was President 44 that made a comment that we haven't yet lived up to the promises of that last line of “Our Pledge of Allegiance” of “liberty and justice for all.” We haven't quite lived up to that promise but we are trying; in fact, maybe we're trying harder now than we ever did. And that's good news. The not-so-good news is that we're still not done yet and we should’ve been long before.  

CK: You’ve been bringing together jazz and classical music for a long time. During your career, how have you seen these genres—one based in the U.S. and created by Black musicians and the other originally from Europe and probably still more associated with white musicians—intertwine and evolve together?  

VM: I can only tell you from my personal experience that African American music has always been part of the fabric of my life. I grew up listening to the radio and I realized early on that those arrangers and composers in R&B were using a lot of orchestral instruments. And that made a really deep impression on me that we could, in fact, integrate the world of this instrumentation and harmony with the styles, rhythmic styles of African American music, not only in jazz, but R&B, funk, and soul. This became part of my working vocabulary that I could go in and out of it very easily. It's a lot easier now, actually, younger musicians are, quite facile in all different styles.

Many of the artists on this record—like, Joshua Redman, and Derrick Hodge—are all younger musicians and very established in their own projects. And I'm grateful for their contributions to this: they're all composers and orchestrators in their own right and able to use that composer’s brain to get themselves into the story in a meaningful way. And then there's Julia [Bullock], who is a rising star of opera. But she is also the model of what contemporary classical musicians are about now, because they are openminded to different styles of music as valid modes of expression. And Julia is a perfect example of that: she's an amazing vocalist and a wonderful musician, and she’s ready to take chances.

CK: You have worked with the Czech National Symphony several times before, and again for this album. What was this most recent experience like?

VM: I started working with them with a couple of other trumpet players, Randy Brecker and Bobby Shew, and we did Trumpet Summit, a project with Branford Marsalis playing his saxophone concerti, and various other things. So, I got to know the orchestra and how they worked. And I played some symphonic repertoire with them and I saw that they were open to immersing themselves in other ways of playing and other modes of expression. That’s a perfect scenario for me to step into. I was commissioned to write the New York Stories. The trumpet concertino for Jan Hasenohrl had some jazz elements in it, but the original orchestration did not have a rhythm section and so we put the rhythm section into this particular recording of the piece.

And then they commissioned the “Concerto for Orchestra” in 2016. We performed it in in 2017, and then we did the first recordings in summer 2019 with Antonio [Sanchez] in residence there. Next, we did the final recordings of the “Concertino” and “To the Edge of Longing”—Julia’s piece—in February of 2020. I arrived back to L.A. and three days later, there was no more traveling. So, we had Julia go back into the Munich studio to overdub her parts. She watched a video of me conducting in Prague from February to work that out. MC Black Thought recorded his rap a month later and finally we had Josh Redman do his thing. … And then we started mixing. I think if I had my druthers, I would have had everyone there to do this piece with us. Altogether the album took from 2016 to 2020. It was a long process getting this record completed.

CK: Will you be touring soon?

VM: I have plans but they are all aspirational. I have couple of concerts in Tunisia in August that are being planned. And I'm back to the Netherlands with Lalah Hathaway in September, and a concert in Cologne with this really wonderful pianist from the Bay Area named Myra Melford, and doing some work in Sweden in November, and then a tour with Richard Bona, a bassist from Cameroon, in December. And there’s so much more. I love being out there and making music. I never thought how much I would miss it. As a composer we’re always sitting in our room by ourselves, but as a conductor being at the podium on a regular basis let's us relate to people and share our music. After not having it for so long you really start feeling it. I'm just over the moon to be able to share music with my colleagues, friends, and soon, our audiences.

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