When he was about eight years old, Don Byron became an avid fan of the short-lived NBC drama T.H.E. Cat, which starred Robert Loggia as a reformed cat burglar turned crime fighter. In particular, he looked forward each week to the slinky, horn-heavy theme song.
“The opening was just bad,” the clarinetist, saxophonist and composer tells WRTI, speaking over the phone while driving home from Manhattan. “It was almost like one of those Jimmy Smith Verve records with big band, but nasty.”
The show lasted only one season (“I remember the day that I opened the TV Guide and it wasn't in there,” Byron says. “I was crying, ‘Where's T.H.E. Cat?’”) but young Don soon shifted his allegiance to CBS and Mission: Impossible. The common thread? Theme music by Lalo Schifrin, one of a cohort of midcentury film composers who transformed the sound of the cinema by drawing inspiration from modern jazz, serialism and other contemporary influences.
“I didn't know Messiaen at the time, but I could hear the modernist in what he was doing,” Byron says of Schifrin. “It was one of those things that I saw when I was a kid that really had a compositional impact. Like, ‘Man, I want to write like that.’”
Byron isn’t exactly fulfilling that childhood wish in his new piece, Quartet for Saxophones, one of several new pieces commissioned by PRISM Quartet that will comprise a program of premieres this weekend. But the five-movement work is inspired in part by Schifrin and other composers of the period, in particular Leonard Rosenman — James Dean’s composer of choice, who scored Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, and introduced twelve-tone music to Hollywood in Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb — and Alex North, known for his jazz-tinged score for A Streetcar Named Desire, and for writing the music to “Unchained Melody.”
“These were the first composers that I really checked out when I was growing up,” Byron explains. “It wasn't classical music per se, but they were the first people whose writing I really noticed.”
One of the movements is named for graphic designer Saul Bass, who created iconic logos for the likes of AT&T and United Airlines, but is best remembered for his title sequences, crafted for such heavyweight filmmakers as Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. Bass drew the storyboards for Hitchcock’s immortal shower scene in Psycho, and Byron’s “Saul Bass” movement is an informal soundtrack to the sequence.
“Some of the greatest moments in film music happened when Saul Bass and Alex North collaborated, or Saul Bass and Henry Mancini,” Byron says. “The great film opening for me is Alex North’s opening of Spartacus with Saul Bass’s visuals. It's just amazing, striking, artistic, very Bauhaus, and a great inspiration to me. It jumps off the screen, many times in a way that the film it was made for does not.”
Byron admired the way that the necessity of accompanying action and imagery forced — or allowed — these composers to experiment with form and dynamics in a way that would be met with greater resistance in a concert hall than it would in a movie theater. It’s a mentality that resonates with Byron, whose polymorphic career has delved into a head-spinning variety of genres and interests — everything from jazz and classical to klezmer and funk, exploring the work of composers as diverse as Raymond Scott, Mickey Katz and Junior Walker.
He has written music for Bang on a Can inspired by Ernie Kovacs and the Tuskegee Airmen, with influences from Esquivel and Ferrante & Teicher; for the ensemble ETHEL in dedication to Marvin Gaye; and a collection of piano etudes for Lisa Moore.
“Both in aesthetic and stylistic range, I think I'm more like those classic film composers than I am a straight jazz musician,” Byron says. “My approach has always been to have a wide range of stylistic ideas that I can present.”
Byron later had the opportunity to work with Schifrin, as one of several guest musicians joining the WDR Big Band for the composer’s 2000 recording Esperanto. “Lalo studied with Messiaen, who was a complete religious fanatic and thought that jazz was the devil's music,” he laughs. “Lalo had to hide the fact that he was playing with Dizzy Gillespie from Messiaen. I’ve had similar experiences, where people in one genre were mad that I was playing another genre.”
Although Byron won’t be performing with PRISM, Quartet for Saxophones also provided the composer, best known as an innovator on the clarinet, with an excuse to renew his lifelong relationship with the saxophone. In writing for multiple saxophones, he harked back to his days playing in sax sections in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and with Afro-Cuban bandleader Mario Bauzá.
One of the piece’s techniques incorporates overtones in a fashion inspired by John Coltrane and another personal favorite. “Joe Henderson was the first musician that made me think that I could be a jazz musician,” Byron describes. “I loved Coltrane, but I thought he was one thing, and I was not one thing at the time. I was studying all kinds of stuff: modern classical music, tarantella music, Latin music. Joe Henderson has more of a ‘not one thing’ aspect to what he does. He's got a few different kinds of playing and something individual in all of them.”
That same quality is what compelled PRISM to commission a piece from Byron, according to the quartet’s tenor saxophonist, co-founder and director, Matthew Levy. “I've been following Don for more than 30 years,” Levy tells WRTI, speaking at a coffee shop near his home in Germantown. “He’s a musical polymath, a virtuoso player, composer and conceptualist whose trajectory bridges so many different forms of music. It's a parallel to what PRISM does, so it’s interesting to us as players and as an organization to make those kinds of connections.”
Sharing the program with Quartet for Saxophones will be new works from composers Henry Vidaver, Teddy Poll and jazz saxophonist Grant Stewart, along with a reprisal of Emily Cooley’s 2018 commission Dissolve. Having worked on his parts in isolation before the Quartet converges for rehearsals this week, Levy points to the particular challenges in Byron’s piece.
“It’s a virtuosic piece, very rhythmically complicated,” he describes. “At times it can be gnarly and atonal, at others it's beautiful and singing, with a cinematic quality. But one thing I love about Don’s music is the humor of it, an element that brings a smile to your face. He's fearless in immersing himself in these traditions, but then turning them on their side.”
PRISM Quartet: Premieres will take place on Saturday at Settlement Music School in Germantown, and on Sunday at Christ & St. Stephens Church in New York.
