Get to Know Composer Michael Blasky, 
Winner of the 2018 Hut Foundation Alumni Commission Award

May 17, 2018 | by Erin Putnam

SFJAZZ High School All-Stars alum Michael Blasky 

Each year, SFJAZZ Education puts out a Call for Proposals for the Hut Foundation Alumni Commission Award: a $1000 award to write a piece for the current High School All-Stars Big Band. The pool? The roughly 250 program alumni who have played in the Big Band themselves at some point or another. This year’s winner is Michael Blasky, originally from Marin County and more recently a graduate of USC’s prestigious Thornton School of Music. The 2013 alumnus and tenor player will be in attendance for the world premiere of his commissioned piece this Sunday, May 20th; read on to learn more about Michael’s incredible original work and the recent North Bay events that shaped it.

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The title of your commissioned piece is "Saint Rose" — can you tell us about that?

“Saint Rose” is a reference to the city of Santa Rosa, CA, and was written with the intent of addressing and honoring the resilience and compassion shown by the inhabitants of the North Bay in the wake of the devastating series of fires this past October. It was inspired in part by the helplessness I felt driving away from the Bay on the morning after the fires began and anxiously relying on the news and social media to stay up to date on the situation as it developed. Simultaneously, the piece was informed by feelings of faith and pride in witnessing the entire Bay Area jump into action to provide aid to those who needed it, be it every single fire station in each of the surrounding counties helping to fight the fires, or the shelters and non-profits in neighboring Marin County collecting donations to the extent that they had to turn donors away.

The piece is very programmatic, almost like a film score. What role has film scoring played for you in the past few years?

I got involved in film scoring during my time at USC; the film school and music school are both physically and artistically adjacent to one another. Besides being a creative and technical challenge every time I sit down with a new film, composing to picture has positively influenced other aspects of my musicianship, above all really instilling the principle that a story comes first. I’ve since been working to (re)orient my approach to music making, be it improvising or composing or producing, around this idea of serving a greater narrative or functional purpose, and having that supersede any personal or ego-driven expectations that might exist… I’m anticipating a life-long pursuit right there, but that’s a mindset I tried to bring to this piece.

Tell us about some of your upcoming projects — any performances or recordings happening in LA or SF this summer?

Over the past few months, I’ve been developing an ongoing series of filmed duo compositions called “Sharing Skies” alongside a close friend and collaborator of mine, guitarist Kyle Scherrer. The project seeks to highlight the relationship between a composition and the space in which it’s performed, so we’ve been recording these videos live and on-location in some particularly fun areas, as well as exploring a similarly wide stylistic and timbral range. So far two of our monthly videos are online at sharingskies.com if you’re curious!

Tickets are still available to this Sunday’s High School All-Stars concert; join us for the premiere of Michael’s incredible tribute, featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning images of Santa Rosa’s Press Democrat.