Paul Nash Dead at 56

[Brownian Motion]

Paul Nash, Jazz Composer Who Set Music in City Spaces, Dies at 56

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: January 28, 2005

Paul Nash, a composer and guitarist who created orchestral jazz works, site-specific compositions for New York public spaces and educational programs for New York public school students, died on Thursday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 56 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications of a brain tumor, said Julia Reinhart, his business associate and the director of the Manhattan New Music Project, the ensemble Mr. Nash led.

Mr. Nash grew up in the Bronx and played in rock bands during his high school years. He attended the Berklee College of Music and, after graduating in 1972, headed to San Francisco, where he earned a master's degree in composition at Mills College in 1976. In the San Francisco area, he formed his first large group, the Paul Nash Ensemble, and went on to help form the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra, which included a string quartet that used public grants to commission new works from contemporary composers.

After he returned to New York in the late 1980's, Mr. Nash went further in that direction, forming the Manhattan New Music Project, a group with up to 16 members, depending on the circumstances. (It is still functioning and plans new concerts.) Since 1990 it has presented 35 new works in Manhattan, by Neal Kirkwood, David Taylor, Bruce Williamson and other composers.

Five recordings of Mr. Nash's music have been released. The most recent was "Soul of Grace," issued on the Soul Note label in 2000. That album contained music that fit somewhere between the hushed, streamlined palette in Gil Evans's work and the defiance of Charles Mingus's.

In 1997 Mr. Nash began writing site-specific compositions. One of them, "Still Sounds Run Deep," has been performed 20 times; in it, musicians arrange themselves around large public areas like Battery Park's Castle Clinton or Central Park's lake, keeping together via stopwatches and instructions from the score, and occasionally interacting with ambient sounds.

Mr. Nash is survived by his wife, Marta; his sister, Margo Nash, of Manhattan; and his mother, Anne Nash, of the Bronx.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

If I'm not mistaken, sister Margo Nash is a writer for the New York Times. Did some pieces on jazz there.

Mike