Richard Nelson is a composer and guitarist who is equally at home in both the jazz and contemporary concert music traditions. An active composer in both idioms as well as a professional jazz guitarist, Richard divides his time between the in-the-moment spontaneity of improvisational explorations and the more deliberately organized realms of composition. But rather than keeping these modalities separate, he also fosters a healthy creative interplay between them.
Richard's recent compositions, both for his own ensembles and others, have been in hybrid formations that utilize improvisation as a unifying element in straddling the realms of contemporary classical music, jazz, and rock. His most recently completed large-scale work Pursuit (forthcoming on CD), a five-movement, 35-minute piece for a thirteen-player ensemble, brings his concert-music-composer's sense of large-scale form, structure and development to a work which is largely in a contemporary jazz idiom. Pieces such as Stillness and Spacetime Foam, both for ensembles of improvisers, are vehicles suitable for both concert-music chamber ensembles and small jazz groups.
In addition to numerous jazz compositions for both small and large ensembles, Richard has a large catalog of fully notated pieces directly in the concert music tradition. These works have been performed widely in concerts and at festivals across the country by such groups as Speculum Musicae, ALEA III, and the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, among many others.
The Richard Nelson Imaginary Ensemble is his vehicle for concerts under his own leadership. Flexible in instrumentation, wide-ranging in genre, the group defies categorization with programs that range from fully-composed pieces and progressive jazz (and improvised music of all sorts) to straight-ahead jazz and music across the rock/pop/folk/blues spectrum.
He has released two albums, Origin Story and Figurations, as a leader, and appears as a sideman on many other releases. A mainstay of the Boston-based Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, Richard's playing can also be heard on eleven CDs recorded with that ensemble.
Richard's undergraduate education was at the University of California (Berkeley). His graduate studies in composition were at Indiana University and Columbia; his principal teachers were Don Erb and Mario Davidovsky. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Nelson currently resides in Maine, where he is an Associate Professor of music and head of the Composition Concentration at the University of Maine at Augusta. http://richardnelsonmusic.com/