Composed in 1936, Peter and the Wolf is a musical fable that introduces children to the orchestra. The story is constructed such that each character has a musical theme played by different instruments: The bird’s theme is played by the flute while the cat’s theme is played by the clarinet, and so on. Throughout the years, the beloved composition has been adapted in popular culture by the likes of Walt Disney and has become a symphony staple, drawing children all over the world to orchestral music. One of those children was American jazz musician Bill Cole, whose aunt took him to the see the show when he was six years old.
“I was very, very intrigued by instruments that were depicting animals,” Cole remembers. “I think that was the first time that I realized that I really loved music, loved sound.”
Growing up in Pittsburgh, his musical palette began to take shape with the help of another woman in his family: his mother.
“I’ve always been interested in music because my mother sang light opera when she was younger,” he says. “Pittsburgh was an extremely dirty city because of the steel mills that were there. So [my mother] was always cleaning the house and as she was cleaning the house, she would sing these pieces that she had learned in light opera. And I would harmonize with her and I didn’t really recognize until much, much later how many pieces she passed onto me by doing this process.”
Cole has been a musical innovator since the ’70s, infusing jazz with the sounds of non-Western wind instruments. However, he didn’t initially set out to pursue a career in music.
“I didn’t think I was going to go into music,” he explains. “I was really interested in things like social work and working in the community and doing community organizing. And I guess in my early 20s, I became a member of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]—this was during the Civil Rights Movement—and I did a lot of work for them.”
Cole entered an undergraduate program in social work, but after losing interest in the mathematical and statistical side of things, he turned to music.
“My bachelor’s and my master’s degrees were in the study of music; It wasn’t in performance at all.” he says. “It was basically the study of Western Art music and also composition and aspects of composition, you know, counter-point harmony, arranging and all that kind of stuff.”
A turning point came during his time as a PhD candidate at Wesleyan University, where he met multi-instrumentalist Clifford Thornton.
“I had played the piano for a long, long time but mostly the pieces that I played were European art music. And I’d always been interested in jazz and improvisational music much more than I was interested in European art music, he says. “So when I got [to Wesleyan], I really wasn’t proficient in playing any kind of improvisational style.”
Thornton gave him a double reed Chinese instrument called a sona and a Korean traditional instrument called a hojok, and asked that he learn to play them. “It was a real hard study because he never even told me that they used reeds,” Cole says. “He was the kind of a person who was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna give you the tools, but you’ve got to learn how to work them and try to play them.’”
While working on the sona and the hojok for a couple of years, Cole also spent time at Thornton’s apartment, listening to him practice. “Clifford was the one who gave me the instruments and he also taught me how to listen to music and how to penetrate paths of the soloists and listen to the accompaniments,” Cole remembers. “That was a very valuable lesson that he gave.”
After listening to Thornton play an Indian instrument called the shena, Cole decided to purchase one himself. Next, he added a fourth instrument to his rotation, the Indian nagaswarm. With his unique and diverse musical approach, he formed the Untempered Ensemble in 1992. Over the span of 20 years, the ensemble has expanded from a trio to a septet featuring Asian, African, Australian, Carribean and American instruments. They’ve released a handful of albums on avant garde jazz label Boxholder Records, including seven pieces that correspond to the cycles of the Ibo of Nigeria’s reincarnation philosophy.
While Cole creates a majority of the Untempered Ensemble’s pieces, the group has recently begun incorporating compositions by pianist Don Pullen into their performances. Cole decided to highlight Pullen’s compositions with the group after hearing him guest on a public radio show. “I had never heard of anyone who had the facility that he had on the piano except for Cecil Taylor, and I really got interested in his music,” he says. “And you know, there were so many musicians who play this music that people have never even heard of…and Don Pullen died in 2005; He was only in his mid-50s.”
Just as fellow composers inspire Cole, so does the world around him. “It’s a very important thing for me to be able to be involved in music,” he says. “There’s a lot of incidents that happen in this country, you know, that provide materials for me to work on in terms of working on music.”
In performance with the Untempered Ensemble, Cole will be debuting his newest composition, “A Piece for Peace,” in Charlottesville as part of the University of Virginia’s artist in residency program.