a melding of disparate traditions into something distinctive and compelling.All About Jazz
methodically drifting compositions [that] blur the line between indie classical and free improvisation.New York Music Daily
Written after a five-year period of intense historical study, Cantata No. 1: An Island Seen and Felt explores themes of displacement, homesickness, spirituality, and nostalgia by expressing personal experiences of Crompton’s childhood, spent growing up in the Surf Coast Shire of Victoria, Australia. Through a unique combination of contemporary improvised music and counterpoint written in the sixteenth-century sacred style, the project aims to synthesize and unite discrete cultural and historical musical elements on the one hand, and on the other, through this synthesis, to capture something of the remote, elemental power of that landscape.
Cantata No. 1 will be released digitally by Amica Records on May 23, 2025.
Premiered at DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Cary Hall
Saturday, September 9th, 2023
featuring:
Aine Hakamatsuka and Rachel Mikol, soprano
Kate Goddard and Masha Polishchuk, violin
Andrew Griffin, viola
Arnie Tanimoto, cello
Jonathon Crompton, alto saxophone
James Wengrow, electric guitar
Sound engineer: Joseph Branicforte
Videographers: Dani Gros, Mariana Meraz, and Tom Cryan
Video Editor: Dani Gros`
This recording is supported by the Australian Federal Government through Creative Australia.
Crompton’s 2019 debut album, Intuit, was hailed as “a substantial musical achievement” by All About Jazz. Featuring fellow saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock, Patrick Breiner, and Patrick Booth, bassist Adam Hopkins, and drummer Kate Gentile, the album celebrates the saxophone, Crompton’s first musical love. Its “coordinat[ed] polyphonies and contrapuntal movements” (Jazz Trail) contain the germ of polyphonic curiosity upon which Crompton would later build and in many ways augur his future development.
Australian composer, alto saxophonist, and scholar Jonathon Crompton
is navigating an uncharted musical space between past and present through an imaginative synthesis of historical and contemporary styles. Now residing in Harlem, Crompton’s work blends lyrical jazz improvisation, contemporary classical composition, and Renaissance counterpoint. By challenging the boundaries and traditions of genre, Crompton has cultivated a singular musical voice. Bringing together some of New York’s leading jazz and early music artists in his works, Crompton creates uniquely beautiful, spiritual, and innovative chamber music.
Wide ranging influences can be heard in Crompton’s music: impressionist composers Ravel and Debussy; American and Australian jazz saxophonists Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton and Bernie McGann; and the genre-bending visionary Art Ensemble of Chicago. Crompton describes his work as the result of “intuitional creativity, between stylistic conformity and individual freedom, the orthodoxies of the past and the ‘post-everything’ period we live in now.”
Future projects include the second of his Australian Cantatas and the completion and recording of a four-part vocal polyphonic mass, Mass for the Modern.