CJO Notes

Jack Schantz To Resign As CJO Artistic Director At The End Of The 2008-09 Season.

Jack Schantz is stepping down as artistic director of the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra to pursue other artistic and personal interests. In a recent interview, Schantz said he may have outgrown the CJO and, perhaps, it’s outgrown him. The Orrville native, an extraordinary trumpet and flugelhorn player who has shaped the direction of northeast Ohio’s top jazz aggregation for 15 years, will stay on through the 2008-2009 season unless the CJO chooses a successor before then. “I think I’d like to see the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra play a more prominent role on the national, maybe even the international, level,” he said. In that interview, Schantz, whose full-time job is coordinator of jazz studies at the University of Akron, said it’s time to move on. What he’d like the CJO to find in his successor is someone with a national, even international, reputation who can catapult the CJO into the top ranks of global jazz bands. Schantz said he’s eager to pursue his trumpet playing, in the CJO, in the more avant-garde Cleveland Jazz Unit, and in smaller, more intimate situations. In effect, Schantz, himself a well-regarded educator, wants to go back to school. He said there have been too many highlights in his career as CJO leader and spokesman to mention all of them. Some include work with Billy Byers, Bill Holman, Sammy Nestico, Slide Hampton, John Fedchock, John Hollenbeck and Cleveland native and saxman extraordinaire Joe Lovano. “My focus has been on writers,” he said. He regrets not having been able to hook up with Carla Bley and Neal Hefti, jazz composers whose work intrigues him. Schantz suggested that his greatest joy in leading the CJO consisted in collaborating with the best players in jazz, both on stage and as guests. He hopes that his successor, whether a man or a woman, pursues the CJO’s goals as a group dedicated to presenting the best of the big-band jazz tradition. Its aim is to preserve that legacy and further it by presenting the best in modern big-band jazz, too. Highlights of Schantz’s career, aside from his years with the CJO, include tours with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Artie Shaw Orchestra, and Woody Herman. He recorded the album, “Speechless,” under his own name in 1993, the year he assumed leadership of the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra. He also has recorded with Oscar Peterson, Phil Woods and Gap Mangione. Schantz took over the top CJO spot from Roland Paolucci, a gifted conductor who first employed Schantz in the mid-70s in the Akron Jazz Workshop. Also part of that workshop: trombonist Paul Ferguson and drummer Mark Gonder, both mainstays of the CJO.

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