The quest to be heard: composer Chuck Iwanusa assembles a dream project

The toughest part of a composer’s journey is the quest to be heard. Lansing-based jazz composer Chuck Iwanusa has had pretty good luck on that score, but he’s had to lead what he calls a “double life” to make it work. He’s spent 40 years working in music education, mostly at Mott Community College in Flint, while shuttling to New York City and other musical hot spots to bring life to his evocative, finely crafted compositions.

Now, Iwanusa is putting together a dream project he calls “a culmination of my 53-year musical journey.”

In September, he’s heading to Sear Sound, the oldest recording studio in New York City, to record with a 17-piece band, anchored by legendary jazz bassist Rufus Reid.

The title of the project, “Together Again for the First Time,” isn’t as paradoxical as it sounds. Iwanusa has worked with all 17 musicians in his long career, just not all at once.

Assembling an all-star big band, and renting a studio as historic as Sear, doesn’t come cheap. Iwanusa has received grants from Pathways to Jazz and other national organizations, along with a New Music USA Creator Fund award, but he’s still working to close the gap via crowdfunding. (Anyone interested in checking out Iwanusa’s music or contributing to the project can learn more on his Facebook page.)

Growing up in Ohio, Iwanusa enjoyed listening to his mother’s collection of big-band music, absorbing everything from “schlocky” Guy Lombardo tunes to the brash experimentation of Stan Kenton.

Anything musically fresh and intriguing caught his ear. He remembers waiting for Beatles tunes to play on his transistor radio, recording them on a reel-to-reel tape and studying every detail of George Martin’s inventive arrangements. (Equipment used by The Beatles at Abbey Road is among the vintage goodies available at the Sear Sound studio, where legends like Lou Reed, Steely Dan, Björk and Yoko Ono have all worked.)

He recalled a TV special where composer Burt Bacharach conducted a band that featured a double-belled euphonium — a two-headed, tuba-like monster that can play in two different ranges.

“That really blew me away,” he said.

As a junior in high school, he studied music theory and music history. He wrote a piece that received an “excellent” rating in the state Music Education Association’s Solo & Ensemble Competition.

“That was it,” he said. He knew he wanted to write music; now came the quest to be heard.

Studying composition and theory at Ohio State University, he found a sympathetic ear in jazz professor Tom Battenberg, who liked Iwanusa’s work and needed new music for the jazz band to tackle.

“He let me sit and listen at every jazz band rehearsal,” Iwanusa said. “He said, ‘Everything you write, we’ll read it.’ I was getting performances as an undergrad, when many grad students weren’t.”

Sticking with jazz in academia wasn’t easy in the early 1970s. One professor told Iwanusa, “You seem to understand this jazz thing, so let’s move on and do something serious.”

But Iwanusa was determined to make his own way.

At the Famous Arrangers Workshop in Las Vegas, he studied with some of the biggest names in the music industry, including Quincy Jones. His dynamic composition “Escape” won the first annual National Association of Jazz Educators composition contest in 1973.

When Henry Mancini conducted a pops concert at Blossom Music Center, Iwanusa brought an orchestral score to the famous “Pink Panther” composer backstage, not expecting a reply.

“About six weeks later, I got a typewritten note,” he said. “He pointed out specific spots to think about: ‘Measure 73 might sound better reinforced with a piccolo.’”

At a Stan Kenton workshop, Iwanusa got to meet several top composers who wrote for the influential bandleader. Kenton even played one of Iwanusa’s tunes in concert.

That workshop is where Iwanusa met one of his collaborators on the upcoming CD project, trumpeter Tim Hagans.

“He was exciting and fiery, a really great player, and we hit it off right away,” Iwanusa recalled.

Iwanusa moved to Los Angeles to be the music librarian for Kenton’s publishing house. He started a big band, the CI Jazz Machine, that served as another showcase for his music.

While studying for a master’s degree in composition at Bowling Green State University, Iwanusa signed up for an internship program that sent teachers out to community colleges in the Midwest. He learned, through a friend, that Mott Community College was interested in starting a jazz program. At Mott, Iwanusa taught jazz history and arranging while zooming off to New York and other jazz hot spots to make music. He retired from teaching at Mott in 2010 and moved to Lansing, where his wife has deep roots, three years ago.

“Together Again” brings Iwanusa together with some of his most treasured, long-term colleagues, including Hagans and blazing tenor saxophonist Rich Perry.

“On my first day at Bowling Green, I hear this amazing tenor player in the practice rooms,” Iwanusa recalled.

It was Perry, fresh out of high school.

“The three of us, with Tim, go back 50-some years.”

Despite their long and intertwined history, Iwanusa, Hagans and Perry finally played together for the first time only four years ago, when Iwanusa’s haunting, apocalyptic piece “No Man’s Land” was premiered at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York.

Pieces like “No Man’s Land” and the intricate “Tone Deaf Little Weasel” push well beyond the familiar jazz formula of an opening “head arrangement,” followed a round or two of solos and a return to the head at the end.

“I wrote mountains of that stuff, but somewhere in the ‘80s, I just got tired of it. It wasn’t going anywhere,” Iwanusa said.

“No Man’s Land” is based on a print made by Iwanusa’s wife, Debra Dow-Iwanusa, of figures wandering in the dust and smoke of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The desolation is framed in glassy, ominous chords, with the sound of a lone trumpet wandering through the emptiness.

“Tone Deaf Little Weasel” comes at you in surging, white-capped breakers of counterpoint. The undulating lines evoke the leaping figures of dancers, multiplied by a hall of mirrors. 

“Weasel,” winner of the 2021 Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize, will be featured on “Together Again,” as will “No Man’s Land.”

Inspiration can strike from any direction. To pay tribute to a friend who was known for using the phrase “six of one, half a dozen of the other,” Iwanusa composed a 12-beat meter made up of contrasting six-beat sections. As if that weren’t enough of a hint, he wrote the theme for baritone sax and trumpet, playing in parallel sixths.

“Ikebana Images” was inspired by a glass sculpture exhibit by Dale Chihuly. “Journey into Autumn,” inspired by a friend who was dealing with aging and retirement, has an appealing, energized bounce, like a crisp fall day. Iwanusa thought of bassist Rufus Reid, a legendary musician featured on hundreds of classic jazz recordings, and decided to write his first piece where the bass takes the melody, along with the woodwinds.

“He has this huge sound, even up in that register,” Iwanusa said. “It just doesn’t get thin. I always imagined hearing him play it someday.”

This September, if all the financial pieces fall into place, he will.