Jeff Scott, a native of Queens, New York, started playing horn at age 14; he credits his first teacher, Carolyn Clark, who taught him for free, as his greatest influence as a musician. Scott received a scholarship to the Brooklyn College Preparatory Division before earning his undergraduate degree at the Manhattan School of Music and his master’s at SUNY/Stony Brook; his horn teachers included Jerome Ashby, David Jolley, Scott Brubaker and William Purvis. Scott was drawn to performing chamber music through coaching with members of the New York Wind Quintet, and became hornist for the Mercury Brass Quintet, giving many workshops and performances under the auspices of Arts Genesis, Young Audiences of New York, and the Midori Foundation. In 1997, Scott became a founding member of Imani Winds, with whom he performed for twenty years. In addition to his concert and studio work, Jeff Scott has appeared with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, was a member of the Broadway orchestras of The Lion King, On the Town, and Showboat, performed on the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s Clockers, recorded with Chico O’Farill, Robin Eubanks, Freddy Cole and Jimmy Heath, and toured with Barbra Streisand, Luther Vandross, the Alvin Ailey and Dance Theater of Harlem Orchestra, and other noted artists and ensembles.
In addition to his distinguished career as a performer, Jeff Scott is also known as an educator, composer, and arranger. From 2002 to 2020, he taught at Montclair State University in New Jersey and then at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music until being appointed Professor of Music at the University of Buffalo in 2024. As a composer, Scott won the 2024 Grammy Award® for Best Classical Compendium for Passion for Bach and Coltrane, wrote works for the Detroit Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and other orchestras, scored the productions of Becoming Something, The Canada Lee Story and Josephine Baker: A Life of Le Jazz Hot!, and created arrangements and original works for woodwind, brass, and jazz ensembles, including several for Imani Winds.
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Poet, writer, critic, and arts administrator Alfred Bennett (A.B.) Spellman, born in 1935 in coastal North Carolina, graduated with a degree in political science from Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1956 and continued his studies at Howard’s law school. Spellman began his writing career in 1959 as a jazz critic for Metronome and DownBeat magazines and a liner note writer for Blue Note Records, and in 1966 published Four Lives in the Bebop Business, a book-length study of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols and Jackie McLean. His experience with jazz was reflected in the forms and rhythms of his first book of poems, The Beautiful Days , published in 1965. During the 1970s, Spellman lectured at Morehouse College, Emory University, Rutgers University and Harvard, and helped to establish the Atlanta Center for Black Art, which promoted the work of regional Black artists in all genres through education, performance and advocacy. In 1973, he became Director of the Arts in Education Study Project for the National Endowment of the Arts, and three years later was appointed Director of the NEA’s Arts Endowment Expansion Program, a position he held for the next eight years. Between 1994 and 1996, Spellman served as Associate Deputy for Program Coordination at the NEA and then became Director of the NEA’s Office of Guidelines and Panel Operations. He continued to serve with the NEA until his retirement in 2005, when he was honored with the establishment of the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, “given annually to an individual who has made major contributions to the appreciation, knowledge, and advancement of the American jazz art form.”
In 2008, after deferring creative writing during his three decades at the NEA, Spellman released Things I Must Have Known, a collection of poetry that the publisher, Coffee House Press, described as follows: “An exuberant, generous collection touching on creativity and fatherhood, racism and workplace politics, A.B. Spellman’s poems address the most important personal and public events of the last seventy years — of how it felt to grow up Black in a segregated America, of the transformational experience of hearing live jazz, of the give-and-take of a long marriage, and of the importance and inspiration of good friends.” Things I Must Have Known received an Honorable Mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.
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In an interview in the Oberlin Review in February 2024, Jeff Scott spoke of the inspiration for Passion for Bach and Coltrane with staff writer Nicolas Stebbins:
How did Passion for Bach and Coltrane come to be?
It was purely inspiration from the poetry. A.B. Spellman is the father of the oboe player in the Imani Winds, Toyin Spellman, and he’s always been sort of a father figure to the ensemble. In 2008, he completed a book of poetry called Things I Must Have Known and gave each one of us in the ensemble a copy…. I read probably six poems out of it, and had to stop. I immediately sent him an email: ‘Mr. Spellman, I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we have to do something together. This poetry is just screaming a project to me. It reads like blues and jazz. I could hear the sway in the words.’
Bach and Coltrane come from very different eras and genres. How did you connect them in your mind and musically?
That was A.B. Spellman. There’s a set of about three or four poems where he’s in a hotel room by himself and he’s just sort of contemplating life. He turns on the radio and hears Bach’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in F minor and it’s sublime to him. He feels like he’s being transformed by the musical line beyond what just listening to music is like. His soul has been transformed.
Then later in the same evening, he hears music by John Coltrane and he experiences the same thing. He realizes that it’s not necessarily about the musicians, but it’s the music they created that both reached this plateau where you’re not thinking about the notes anymore. You’ve been transformed. Then he says, ‘I wonder what would have happened or what would happen if they, by chance, would meet in heaven. What would that conversation be like?’
I was totally influenced by A.B. Spellman in the Passion . While he said he hadn’t heard music behind what he wrote, it was informed by a knowledge of music, a knowledge of the history of music, and a knowledge of the history of religion.
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“Passion” in the title of the work refers not just to Scott and Spellman’s love for the music of Coltrane and Bach, but also to the ancient sacred genre that told of the suffering and death of Christ on the Cross — Bach composed five of these Passions for performance on Good Fridays in Leipzig; only the St. John (1724) and St. Matthew (1727) survive complete. The word “passion” derives from the Latin “patior ”— “to undergo, to suffer ”—and was taken into Medieval vernacular and ecclesiastical languages to refer to the story of the Crucifixion: The Passion of Christ; the Oxford English Dictionary traces its first known use in our language to 1175.
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Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboist of Imani Winds, provided the following information about Passion for Bach and Coltrane in the liner notes for the Grammy Award®-wining recording of the work issued in August 2023:
“Jeff Scott’s Passion for Bach and Coltrane is a concert-length Passion oratorio that combines elements from classical and jazz music. It features orator and poet A.B. Spellman, as well as wind quintet Imani Winds, string quartet Harlem Quartet, and jazz trio Alex Brown, Edward Perez, and Neal Smith.
“This brief summary, though entirely accurate, profoundly misses what makes this work one of Imani Winds’ most personal musical journeys.
“Inspiration runs through every aspect of this composition based on music by Johann Sebastian Bach and John Coltrane, and not just in the improvised solos threaded throughout the work. One might be tempted to think this composition is a mere redressing of these giants’ work. That too doesn’t tell the whole story — this is a piece of astonishing originality; and in today’s musical landscape, inspiration is an entirely underrated miracle.
“Poet A.B. Spellman has had a lifelong passion for Bach and Coltrane. Even now, at the age of 89, when either composer’s music plays on the radio, he stops and listens with all of his strength. His enduring love for their music led him to write poetry about the two men ‘swapping infinite fours’ in heaven, as music is his religion and those Prophets his musical stanchions.
“I know this, by the way, because A.B. Spellman is my father.
“When Jeff Scott, Imani Winds’ founding hornist, first experienced Dad’s poetry, he felt the need to enhance the spirit of the words in music. Jeff spent months reading his dog-eared copy of the poems in Things I Must Have Known while our group toured the world. Eventually, he took a trip to the church in Leipzig where Bach had been musical director; in that pilgrimage, Jeff felt a deep connection to both Bach and Coltrane’s universal spirituality, which helped him complete the work.
“Bach’s Presence. Jeff took the shape of the piece from Bach’s iconic Goldberg Variations. Passion opens with Aria and a poem describing Bach’s effect on my father. The Goldberg theme is masterfully arranged among the entire ensemble. Other references to Bach are scattered with more or less intensity throughout each movement. The biggest quote is in Variation 13, where Scott makes a jazz variation-within-a-variation. Out Of Nazareth is the true classical Passion of the whole work. At one point, A.B.’s poetry describes Christ’s moments to and from the Cross with brutal beauty, accompanied by a Bach chorale. The rest of the movement is a musical illumination of the texts that speaks directly to how the Passion relates to contemporary times.
“Coltrane’s Influence. Jazz is equally omnipresent, as Jeff used the spirit of A Love Supreme, one of Coltrane’s most sacred works, to guide the movement of the music. The second movement, Psalm , shows a glimpse of the scope of the piece with a jazz chant and A.B.’s poem that begins ‘I will die in Havana in a hurricane.’ The next track, Resolution, after John Coltrane’s rhapsodic tune, is the mirror image of Aria and speaks to my father’s deep communion with Coltrane. Groovin’ Low is a swinging Baroque slow drag: ‘I bop to the bassline now,’ A.B. declares. A Hug for Gonzalo is a tribute to pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and the sacred power of being a passionate listener of music. Acknowledgement, the final movement, is a play on the Resurrection of Christ, combining A Love Supreme and an uplifting poem on death, renewal and the power of love.
“Imani Winds, my father, Harlem Quartet, Alex Brown, and Neal Smith have performed the Passion many times together since 2015. Every time, it has been such a healing experience, almost transcendental. I believe this is partially because of the sacredness of the piece, but not necessarily because of its religious material. When music is made with true collaboration, fearlessness, and love, it can elevate those who experience it to a higher realm.”
