Biography

      

Jennifer Griffith creates vocal and instrumental works that are inspired by social issues, politics and human relationships. As a small child she listened to a steady diet of early jazz and blues when her pianist mother performed in Dixieland jazz and dance bands. In her teens and early twenties Jennifer performed as a pianist and jazz singer (she and her saxophonist brother were into bebop and beyond), but in the next ten years pursued studies in Western European music and graduated with a B.A. in piano performance. At Smith College she earned a masters degree in composition and moved to NYC to earn her doctorate. Her pocket opera Dream President was presented in New York City Opera’s VOX 2004, again at the National Opera/Opera Index/Manhattan School of Music’s Opera Theater presentations in 2005, and in a collaborative production Opera After Hours, directed by Christopher Alden, at the Zipper Factory in 2008.

Griffith has received awards from the MacDowell Colony and the American Music Center, and her chamber works have been performed by American Opera Projects, new music ensembles Cygnus, Glass Farm, and Vox Novus's electroacoustic 60x60 Dance concerts. Griffith attends the CUNY Graduate Center where she has studied with Thea Musgrave, David Del Tredici and Tania León. Her disseratation concerns composer/bandleader/bassist Charles Mingus, and his responses to early jazz and black male performer identities.

Currently Griffith is collaborating with playwright Dominic Orlando, on a new one-act opera, Beautiful Creatures, an anxious frolic through politics and people in the environmental movement. In collaboration with translator Zahra Partovi, she recently completed a setting of the Persian poet J. M. Rumi's The Reed, a commission for the Brooklyn Grace and Spiritus Chorale. Griffith occasionally sings jazz at NYC venues and is featured on reedman and composer Steve Elson's Mott and Broome. Her bestiary “A Little Beastliness for Guitar” can be heard on Oren Fader’s cd First Flight.