Mozart Meets Betty Boop: How Joel Pierson and the Queen's Cartoonists Are Getting People Hooked on Classical Music and Jazz with Classic Cartoons
Joel Pierson
From dinosaurs dancing to The Rite of Spring in Disney's Fantasia to a tuxedoed Bugs Bunny performing Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, classic cartoons have long been a delightful entry point for kids of all ages to get to know classical music.
That's a tradition composer and jazz pianist Joel Pierson is breathing new life into as artistic director of The Queen’s Cartoonists. Working at the crossroads of classical music, jazz, and the golden age of animation, The Queen's Cartoonists perform the scores of classic animated films from around the world, perfectly synchronizing their brilliant jazz-band arrangements with the films projected on stage.
Winning audiences over with their madcap humor and a musical palette that mixes Rossini and Strauss with Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott, the ensemble has sold out venues from the Blue Note Jazz Club to the Konzerthaus Berlin. For Pierson, the group's mission is simply to show that anyone can discover a love for classical music and jazz, given the right introduction.
"I always say we're essentially tricking people into liking classical music and jazz," Pierson says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "Of course we're playing a lot of [that] music, but that's not really how you get people in. The hook is that this is a bunch of animated films with a highly synchronized live performance by some excellent New York musicians, and people really like that."
In this episode, we talk more about Pierson's process for arranging the wide variety of music The Queen's Cartoonists performs, and he gives us a sneak peek at the group's latest project — a wildly inventive reimagining of Mozart's Requiem. Plus, he shares how travel fuels his creativity, his favorite basement beer bar in New York City, and why a bidet attachment is truly, in his words, "a life-changer."
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