It’s not easy to write something new about composer, violinist, and educator Jessie Montgomery – to say something that hasn’t already been said about the GRAMMY winner and “Performance Today” 2025 Classical Woman of the Year. And with a professional career spanning over two decades, it would be easy for Montgomery to not compose anything new anymore – to settle into compositional styles and techniques, sounds and instrumentation, storylines and intentions. But on April 3 at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, Montgomery presented a path not already landscaped for her Composer Portrait featuring The Everything Band, a new project she is building to challenge musical backgrounds, mix various influences, and re-define how we engage multidisciplinary artists in one setting.
Source Code for string quartet opened the program with the composer on violin joining violinist Monica Davis, violist Dana Kelley, and cellist Gabriel Cabezas. The quartet fostered the slippery movement between harmonic timbres and evoked a sense of solitude and contemplation — meditative, but also interrupting expectations, just like the mind. There were no breaks in sound, making the incremental shifts audible in the ear and impressive in execution.
“Losaida, My Love,” an ode to Montgomery’s upbringing on the Lower East Side, and “Lunar Songs,” a tone poem paying tribute to Bernstein and his relationship to New York City, featured mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran and presented incredible chemistry between musicians. Luscious sustained tones were juxtaposed with or cut by sharp and brittle staccatos; between the marvel of Montgomery’s pecking solos and the upright bass played like a drum, the songs were stylistically defined by articulation yet tempered by a whispering, delicate sheerness, as tender as holding a newborn baby.
Break Away showcased an extravagant use of harmonics and improvisation “intentionally breaking away from the score before returning to home,” Montgomery said during a brief in-concert talk with Melissa Smey, Executive Director of Miller Theatre. The work drowned a plucked cello under a catch-me-if-you-can dynamic with the violins. The quartet’s virtuosity was amplified by their ability to crunch puzzle pieces of layered harmonies, meter, and timbre into a train-like climax—on the verge of derailment but never veering off track.
The world premiere of Everything, All at Once brought more The Everything Band members on-stage as drummer Jerome Jennings, flutist Allison Loggins-Hull, saxophonist Lynn Ligammari, guitarist Grey Mcmurray, violinist Jannina Norpoth, bassist Eleonore Oppenheim, and guest pianist Pascal Le Boeuf joined the string quartet.
“Intro” opened with a motif tossed about and exchanged between winds and strings like a fugue. Jennings’ light yet energetic touch waded through the balance of drums and strings without sacrificing meter or sound, and Mcmurray lended a smooth disposition with subtle shades of electronic sounds rather than proclamations.
“The Poet” locked strings into a pulsed repetition while drums were given the freedom to roam until “Intermezzo” burst with a tight opening, the entire band in unison on a dizzyingly fast, repeated run. The rhythm section loosened it, allowed to jam without interference until the flute fluttered in, pulling the rest of the band into the fray.
“The Poet and Teacher” flowed into “Outro” and delivered the most stunning beauty of the night: Cabeza’s cello reached about as close to divinity as any musician is going to get, and Le Beouf offered a sparkling and incandescent solo in the highest range of the piano. The intro motif returned, but released of its tension, the freneticism of the lines and articulations no longer crunched, calming the energy on stage and ears in the audience.
Throughout the night, some of the improvisational sections, particularly in Everything, All at Once, were thin or static, sometimes slushed into a wall of sound without clear direction. Musicians know that improvisation is learned, that jazz musicians don’t just feel and vibe it – they spend just as many years training and practicing endless repetitions as classical musicians do. Strings and flute didn’t always find their way to the threshold of magnitude and intensity that the rhythm section had laid down, dampening climaxes.
Conservatory and music school curricula are working to push past the parameters of Western classical music education. And the field of contemporary music overall is addressing the institutional gatekeeping that makes classical music exclusionary and inaccessible. Montgomery is laying a critical foundation by giving herself permission to take from all manners and modes of music. By mixing styles, she broke the behavioral ethics and protocols for audiences that are baked into different genres like clapping after a solo or hollering in the middle of one; common in jazz, unheard of in classical. One thing often lost in this polystylistic approach is the question of who should come together to play it, but Montgomery and The Everything Band get it, bringing together musicians from clearly demarcated schools of study to bend genre until it – and the rules contained within it – break.
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