Biography

      

Jennifer grew up in a musical family, and as a small child listened to a steady diet of early jazz and blues when her pianist mother led a Dixieland jazz band. In her teens and early twenties Jennifer also performed as a pianist and jazz singer (she and her saxophonist brother Frank were heavy into bebop and beyond by then) but in the next ten years pursued the Western European tradition and graduated with a B.A. in piano performance. In her mid-thirties, she arrived at Smith College to study the music and lives of women composers, but changed her emphasis when her mentor, composer Donald Wheelock, encouraged her to compose. She earned a masters degree in composition and moved to NYC to pursue her studies. Her pocket opera Dream President was presented in New York City Opera’s VOX 2004 and again at the National Opera/Opera Index/Manhattan School of Music’s Opera Theater presentations in 2005.

Griffith has received awards from the MacDowell Colony and the American Music Center, and her chamber works have been performed by the Cygnus and Glass Farm ensembles.; she is also finishing a doctorate degree in composition at the CUNY Graduate Center where she has studied with Thea Musgrave, David Del Tredici and Tania León. Her disseratation is on composer/bandleader/bassist Charles Mingus, and his personal and musical responses to earlier eras of jazz and race politics, specifically to predecessors he admired--Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

Currently Griffith is collaborating with playwright Dominic Orlando, who wrote her a libretto for a new one-act opera, Beautiful Creatures, an anxious frolic through politics and people in the environmental movement. She occasionally sings jazz at NYC venues. Her bestiary “A Little Beastliness for Guitar” can be heard on Oren Fader’s cd First Flight.