Berger, Dave

Berger, Dave, jazz composer, trumpeter, educator; b. N.Y., March 30, 1949. He studied at Berklee Coll. of Music until 1966, earned a B.M. at Ithaca Coll. (1967–71), studied at the Eastman School of Music (on and off, 1967–81), including work with Rayburn Wright (1970–1) and Jimmy Maxwell (1972–80), and earned an M.M. in Jazz Composition at the Manhattan School of Music (1985–6). He first played trumpet with big bands, but has worked most often as a composer and orchestrator, collaborating on albums and with the bands of Gerry Mulligan, Clark Terry, Buddy Rich, Chuck Israels, Quincy Jones, Lee Konitz, Mercer Ellington, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, and singers Carol Charming and Leslie Uggams. He served as conductor, transcriber and arranger for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orch. (1988–94). He has scored such films as Brighton Beach Memoirs and The Cotton Club and Broadway shows including Sophisticated Ladies, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Jerry’s Girls; he has written music for TV’s Tonight Show and PBS specials. He worked with Wynton Marsalis on the Marsalis on Music series for PBS-TV, Blood on the Fields for Columbia Records and NPR, and the Making the Music series for NPR. For choreographer Donald Byrd, Berger created “The Harlem Nutcracker/” which includes 28 minutes of Ellington and Strayhorn’s “Nutcracker” and an additional 90 minutes of his own interpretations of the unused Tchaikovsky themes in the Ellington style; this was performed in N.Y. and on tour (1996–8). Since 1985, he has taught at the Manhattan School of Music, where he conducted two concerts of Duke Ellington’s sacred music (December 1993) with Marsalis, Jon Hendricks, William Warfield, and choreographer Mercedes Ellington. He has also taught at William Paterson Coll. (1986–93), New School for Social Research (1987–9), Long Island Univ. (1985–8), Montclair State Coll. (1985–7), Jersey City State Coll. (1979–82, and at numerous clinics and workshops. His second jazz symphony, “Self Portraits in Blue,” was completed with the help of an NEA award around 1997. He conducted Live from Lincoln Center: A Classical Jazz Christmas (PBS-TV, 1989). He is a noted Ellington specialist who has transcribed over 300 of his works (and about 200 other big band classics). Berger was perhaps the first to publish scores and accurate parts of Ellington’s recordings for public performance.

—Lewis Porter