Bert Joris in conversation

Bert Joris (b. 1957, Antwerp) is a world-renowned trumpeter, composer and arranger. His music has featured regularly at College Street since 2008 and can be heard on recordings such as The Music of Bert Joris (2002), Signs and Signatures (2009) and Smooth Shake (2018). His forthcoming album, The Music of Bert Joris: The Next Chapter, recorded with the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, is scheduled for release in January 2027.

As the second Vladimir Khusid Fellow, following Gordon Goodwin (1954-2025), Joris visited Grammar in May 2026. During his visit, he presented a composition masterclass for more than 120 Jazz and HSC Music pupils, led a workshop with Dr V’s Swing Thing, rehearsed two of his works with the College Street Jazz Orchestra, and performed with the School’s jazz ensembles before a capacity audience at the Fellowship Concert.

On 4 May, Joris spoke with Assistant Headmaster (Senior Housemaster) Dr Luke Harley and Head of Jazz Studies Mr Jason Isaac about jazz, composition and music education.

Jason Isaac: You often say you learned composition through listening rather than books.

Bert Joris: Books gave me information but not instinct. What helped was deep transcription: taking recordings apart and understanding how harmony, orchestration, rhythm, and form actually function in real music. Dizzy Gillespie’s Things to Come became a composition course for me. Gil Evans’s writing for Miles Davis, especially Miles Ahead, was another major influence. Those recordings taught me to trust my ears before my intellect.

What fascinated me was the way great arrangers create momentum without necessarily adding more notes. The best writing often feels inevitable. Listening also taught me proportion. Great composers understand not only what to include, but what to leave out. Maturity often reveals itself through economy.

Luke Harley: Your writing for trombones – one of my favourite topics [Mr Isaac laughs] – and brass sections is especially distinctive. What draws you to that sound?

Bert Joris: It comes down to colour and restraint. The middle register of the brass family is extraordinarily rich, yet many writers feel the need to add more. I have always been interested in how much can be achieved with relatively little.

A great deal depends on spacing. Voices can be placed quite closely together or widely apart, but I generally avoid an ambiguous middle ground. Clear spacing gives harmony a strong identity. A well-voiced trombone section already contains enormous warmth, depth and character; it seldom needs extra notes.

I am also fascinated by doubling. When different instruments play the same line together, the result is not merely louder. Their timbres interact, creating a new composite sound enriched by overtones and resonances that none of the instruments could produce alone. Those subtle shifts in colour interest me far more than complexity for its own sake. In works such as “The Magic Box”, orchestration becomes part of the storytelling. The piece was inspired by an Asian ink painting that stayed with me because it revealed more the longer I looked at it. In that sense, it reminds me of Escher’s Möbius Ring: immediately clear, yet endlessly rich beneath the surface.

Sometimes moving a single voice or reshaping the spacing of a chord has more impact than adding another layer. Brass can easily dominate an ensemble, particularly in a large jazz orchestra, so the challenge is not to make the music louder but more expressive.

Luke Harley: Given your classical training, do jazz and classical music feel like fundamentally separate worlds?

Bert Joris: I’ve never believed in strict borders. Jazz is difficult to define, but when it’s real, you recognise it immediately.

As a European, I’ve always felt some distance from the American experience that produced jazz, and I approach that tradition with humility and respect. But I don’t see classical and jazz as opposing camps. They’re simply different ways of organising sound, time, and expression.

Jazz brings improvisation into the centre of musical life. It reminds us that music is something living, not simply something fixed on a page. When classical and jazz traditions inform one another, imagination becomes richer and more flexible. When they are kept artificially separate, both lose something valuable.

Many classical musicians can benefit from the spontaneity and flexibility that improvisation encourages, while jazz musicians can learn from the formal discipline and structural thinking found in the classical tradition. Music becomes interesting when influences meet rather than when they are isolated.