Michael Mantler

Michael Mantler (born August 10, 1943) is an Austrian trumpeter and composer in new jazz and contemporary music.

Mantler was born in Vienna, Austria. He went to the United States in 1962 to study music, and after early activities within the New York avant garde community, including work with Cecil Taylor and the Jazz Composer's Guild, he was a founder of the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association aka JCOA, a non-profit organisation to commission, perform, and record new compositions for jazz orchestra.

The problems of independently distributing the orchestra's record label led him to form the New Music Distribution Service (as a division of JCOA) in 1972, an organisation which was to serve many independent labels for almost twenty years.

He then had a personal and professional relationship with Carla Bley, to whom he was married from 1967–1992, and with whom he had a daughter, Karen Mantler, now also a musician in her own right. Eventually Bley and he established their own company, WATT — a record label, recording studio, and publisher. He toured and recorded extensively with the Carla Bley Band as well as occasionally with his own live performance projects.

Mantler recorded many solo albums with varying instrumentation and personnel, emphasizing his work as a composer rather than as a band leader. Appearing infrequently live, he mostly concentrated on composing and recording. Among others, he recorded an album with the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra plus soloists (Something There), and several albums of songs using the words of writers as diverse as Samuel Beckett (No Answer), Harold Pinter (Silence), and Edward Gorey (The Hapless Child).

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