Our friend, composer and pianist Andy Emler, in concert in Mexico
There are musicians whose careers unfold quietly, through accumulation rather than spectacle, until one day you look up and realize how deeply their work has permeated the contemporary musical landscape. Andy Emler is very much one of those figures. A composer and pianist of restless curiosity and uncommon rigor, he has long moved with ease between written form and improvisation, between jazz, contemporary classical music and the fertile borderlands that connect them.
This January, that journey brings him to Mexico for a series of concerts that read less like a tour schedule than a compact manifesto of his artistic world.
On January 17, at the Sala Carlos Chávez of the Centro Cultural Universitario at UNAM in Mexico City, Emler presents My Own Ravel, a personal and probing dialogue with the spirit of Maurice Ravel. Rather than a tribute frozen in reverence, the project approaches Ravel as a living presence, filtered through Emler’s harmonic imagination, rhythmic elasticity and sense of playful intelligence.
The following evening, January 18, he takes on a very different role, yet one that suits him just as naturally. At the Sala Nezahualcóyotl, Emler appears as the soloist in the Improvised Piano Concerto by Eugenio Toussaint, conducted by José Areán. Toussaint’s work, emblematic of a Mexican composer who himself bridged jazz and symphonic writing, offers Emler a wide canvas: a large orchestral form in which spontaneity is not an embellishment but the very engine of the music.
The Mexican chapter concludes on January 23 in Tetitlán, a setting that promises a more intimate encounter, and perhaps the clearest reminder that Emler’s music, however sophisticated its architecture, is ultimately grounded in direct exchange, with musicians, with audiences, with place.
Taken together, these concerts sketch the portrait of an artist for whom borders, between genres, traditions, or even countries, exist primarily to be crossed. In Mexico this January, Andy Emler does not merely perform; he continues a conversation that has been at the heart of his work all along.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News