Maverick Maestro [Hardcover]

Maurice Peress leads an unusual American musical life. Born to a Baghdadian father and Polish mother, his first music was Arabic and Yiddish songs. He grew up in New York's Washington Heights, became a busy dance band and symphonic trumpeter, and was drafted towards the end of the Korean conflict, landing him in a newly integrated Negro Regimental Band. In this memoir, he shares what he learned from an enormous range of American works and musicians. In his first book, Peress explored America's music and its African American roots. A musical mission emerges, a lifelong commitment to give concerts that reconstruct delicious mixed marriages of music, black and white, Jazz and classical, folk and concert, Native American and European; works that bring people together, that urge us to love one another.

Maurice Peress leads an unusual American musical life. Born to a Baghdadian father and Polish mother, his first music was Arabic and Yiddish songs. He grew up in New Yorks Washington Heights, became a busy dance band and symphonic trumpeter, and was drafted towards the end of the Korean conflict, landing him in a newly-integrated Negro Regimental Band. In his memoir, Maverick Maestro, Peress shares what he learned as an assistant to Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic and symphonic arranger for Duke Ellington. He worked closely with icons of the concert and operatic worldthe five piano concertos of Beethoven with Alfred Brendel, Tristan in concert with Eileen Farrellas he led orchestras in Corpus Christi, Austin, and Kansas City and as a guest conductor in Chicago, Prague, and Shanghai.

With insightful writing, Peress brings us closer to a wide array of boundary-crossing American works and musicians he has worked with: Feldmans Rothko Chapel, Ellingtons Black, Brown and Beige, Bernsteins Mass, Antheils Ballet M?canique, Whitemans Birth of the RhalóŽ