Paul Nash

Born in the Bronx in 1948, orchestral jazz composer and guitarist Paul Nash grew up as the son of a classical pianist. One of his teenage rock groups shared a 1966 bill at Greenwich Village’s Café Wha? with an unknown Jimi Hendrix opening for the Blues Project, providing an early if brief brush with recognition. After completing studies at the Berklee College of Music in 1972, he moved to San Francisco and received a master’s degree in composition from Mills College in 1976. He soon assembled the ten-piece Paul Nash Ensemble, whose members included trumpeter Mark Isham and drummer Eddie Marshall. His first album, A Jazz Composer’s Ensemble, appeared in 1979; Second Impression followed in 1985 and Night Language in 1987. That year he also played a key role in founding the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra, whose performances of new works by living composers regularly incorporated a string quartet. The experience continued to influence his writing after he returned to New York in 1990 and launched the Manhattan New Music Project, an ensemble of up to sixteen players devoted to premiering pieces by composers such as Neal Kirkwood and Bruce Williamson. The group released two albums, Mood Swing in 1993 and Soul of Grace in 2000. Around 1997 Nash began creating site-specific works; the most widely noted, “Still Sounds Run Deep,” positions musicians throughout large public spaces so they may blend with surrounding ambient sounds while staying synchronized through stopwatches and written cues. He died in Manhattan on January 27, 2005, at age fifty-six from complications of a brain tumor.