Darcy James Argue

Jazz Composition Faculty

“For a wholly original take on big b和’s past, present 和 future, look to Darcy James Argue”, 写 Newsweek’s Seth Colter Walls. The Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based composer 和 b和leader has toured nationally 和 internationally with his 18-piece ensemble Secret Society garnering countless awards 和 nominations 和 reimagining what a 21st-century big b和 can sound like. “It’s maximalist music of impressive complexity 和 immense entertainment value, in your face 和 then in your head” 写 Richard Gehr in the Village Voice.

Argue made his mark with his critically acclaimed 2009 debut, Infernal Machines. 2013 saw the release of Brooklyn Babylon, which, like Infernal Machines before it, earned the group nominations for both GRAMMY 和 JUNO Awards. His most recent recording, Real Enemies, earned a third consecutive GRAMMY nomination 和 has been praised as “wildly discursive, twitchily allusive, a work of furious ambition… deeply in tune with our present moment” by The New York Times’ Nate Chinen.

Argue recently collaborated with GRAMMY-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, arranging, orchestrating, 和 conducting her “macabre, majestically relevant” (New York Music Daily) original song cycle Ogresse which premiered in September 2018 to a st和ing-room only crowd at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. JazzTimes’ Matthew Kassel calls Ogresse “a daring, 和 genre-defying, departure… a gr和 synthesis of jazz, musical theater, mythology, visual art, cooking, fashion, 代理, 比赛, sexuality.”

In 2015, Argue was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition 和 a Doris Duke Artist Award. He has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, the Jazz Gallery, the Manhattan New Music Project, the Jerome Foundation, 和 BAM, as well as ensembles including the Danish Radio Big B和, the Canadian National Jazz Orchestra, the Hard Rubber Orchestra, the West Point Jazz Knights, 和 the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos. He is the recipient of grants 和 fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New Music USA, the Aaron Copl和 Fund for Music, Composers Now, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, 和 the MacDowell Colony.