Maverick Maestro

Maurice Peress leads an unusual American musical life. Born to a Baghdadian father and Polish mother, his first music was Arabic and Yiddish songs. He grew up in New York’s Washington Heights, became a busy dance band and symphonic trumpeter, and was drafted towards the end of the Korean conflict, landing him in a newly-integrated Negro Regimental Band. In his memoir, Maverick Maestro, Peress shares what he learned as an assistant to Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic and symphonic arranger for Duke Ellington. He worked closely with icons of the concert and operatic world—the five piano concertos of Beethoven with Alfred Brendel, Tristan in concert with Eileen Farrell—as he led orchestras in Corpus Christi, Austin, and Kansas City and as a guest conductor in Chicago, Prague, and Shanghai.

With insightful writing, Peress brings us closer to a wide array of boundary-crossing American works and musicians he has worked with: Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige, Bernstein’s Mass, Antheil’s "Ballet Mécanique," Whiteman’s Birth of the "Rhapsody in Blue," Earl Robinson’s Lonesome Train; David Amram, Langston Hughes, José Limón, Francis Ford Coppola, Aaron Copland, John Corigliano, Benny Goodman, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and more.

Peress’ insightful writing explores an enormous range of American works and musicians. He walks us through the bitter musicians’ strike in Kansas City, and he is not shy about weaving aspects of his personal life––loves and loss––into the story: his fall from grace in his fifties that found him starting a fruitful academic career at the Aaron Copland School of Music, and his Jewishness, "being a member of the first generation when it was OK to be Jewish."

In his first book, Peress explored America’s music and its African American roots. In Maverick Maestro, a musical mission emerges, a lifelong commitment to "give concerts that reconstruct delicious mixed marriages of music, black and white, Jazz and classical, folk and concert, Native American and European; works that bring people together, that urge us to love one another."