Composer and pianist Billy Childs got his professional start as a sideman for jazz giants including Freddie Hubbard and J.J. Johnson, while simultaneously earning a B.M. in composition from USC under the tutelage of Robert Linn and Morton Lauridsen. He began recording his own compositions for jazz combos starting in the late 1980s, and soon commissions followed from classical ensembles, including several works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Childs has continued to straddle both musical worlds, winning a total of six Grammy awards for his compositions, jazz performances, and arrangements.

For this co-commission from Orpheus and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Childs responded to events that were weighing heavily on him—including illnesses and deaths among his friends, and the overall state of the country—with a work that he saw as a way of his “psyche rebelling against all of this stuff,” he explained in an interview. “I started thinking about the fact that with each moment, you don’t know what is going to happen. I wanted to give the sense that there are things still unfolding in your life that could be positive.”

In Each Moment is a New Discovery, Childs leans into some of the formal structures of European classical music, and his transparent orchestration for the small ensemble of soloists recalls Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and their more recent offspring from neoclassical composers like Stravinsky and Hindemith. Harmonically, Childs ruminates on so-called perfect intervals (i.e. seconds, fourths and fifths in musical terms) that create a “sound of possibilities” in the ways they avoid committing to either major or minor sonorities.

Childs recalled being very young and listening to the fugues that his mother would play and thinking that it sounded like a game of “follow the leader.” That early love of counterpoint comes through in Each Moment, where voices imitate each other in overt and subtle ways. At the same time that he honors the classical tradition, Childs creates propulsive rhythmic patterns and asymmetrical grooves steeped in his own lifelong approach to music, where drums are the “heartbeat” at the center of everything. (Even when listening to Bach or any other classical music, Childs says, “I definitely hear what a drum set would be doing.”) He observed that for “people who play with a European classical sensibility, the time seems to be coming from a different place than in a jazz group. In classical ensembles, the time is usually an agreement within the ensemble; it’s malleable. In jazz, the time is more often than not external; it’s outside of yourself. It’s what the clock or the count-off says it is.  In jazz, we talk about ‘swinging,’ and that doesn’t necessarily have to mean the dance-like swing you would hear from Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones [the bassist and drummer on classic albums by Miles Davis and others]. To me, ‘swinging’ means rhythmic acuity that feels organic.”