Paul Brody

Youth and education

Paul Brody's father was the son of a Ukrainian immigrant and his mother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-era Vienna.

Brody spent most of his youth in San Leandro, California, where his struggles with dyslexia led him find his voice in music and poetry. He studied composition, poetry, and trumpet at San Francisco State University and Boston University and Third stream music at the New England Conservatory of Music. As a writer and performer, Brody was active in the Boston's lively poetry and experimental music scene. At Boston University he produced a series of inter-disciplinary events with the actors, dancers, poets and musicians, which he called Un-recitals. He learned from such poets as Denise Levertov, Bill Knot, Derek Walcott and Charles Simic and was often invited to read for literary events. Before receiving a bachelor in music performance he won two prizes from Boston University's literary magazine, Ex Libris. After earning a master's degree in Third stream music from the New England Conservatory of Music, Brody toured with various ensembles before settling in Berlin to pursue a career as a composer, performer, and sound artist.

Sound Installation work

Citing influences from Joseph Beuys, Charles Ives, Samuel Beckett, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, along with the story and folklore collecting traditions of Studs Terkel and Alan Lomax, Brody uses oral history to create word and sound-orientated narratives from documentary material. “A story is a melody and a melody is a story,” Brody explained in an interview with Der Tagesspiegel. His installation work generally examines the relationship between voice-melody and identity and the notion of home. Brody believes that while words carry one meaning, the voice-melody can be heard as carrying its own independent narrative. Voices speaking one language with the melody of another language contain infinitely more complex parallel narratives. In addition, the voice-melody reveals both impersonal and personal information: origin, family history, travels, but also emotional state and physical condition.

Brody's first major sound installation was featured at the Jewish Museum Berlin's 2011 Heimatkunde (local history) Exhibit. Five Easy Pieces explored the notion of home by asking people who live in Berlin to describe how they view themselves in relation to their adopted city. The installation includes Swiss filmmaker Dani Levy, Afro-German writer Katharina Oguntoy, Indian curator Mini Kapur, teachers Anna and Helmut Franz, and Brody himself. While the Berliners describe their place in Berlin, their voice-melodies reveal much about where they come from and their emotional state. The museum built a surround sound room to display the exhibit. 

Brody created a surveillance art piece, Five Families Listening: An Eavesdropping Installation (2015), for the NK art space in connection with the Transmediale Festival for Art and Digital Culture. The piece explores the acoustic spaces of living rooms through secret recordings of families talking. 

Brody's Art Accompanying Noise (2016) for the Prinz-Georg Art Space is a pivotal work, exploring the narrative quality of sounds that artists make while they work. The materials and tools an artist uses to create a picture or a sculpture all create a soundscape. For example, the sound of glass being chipped and wood being cut. Even the sound of paint smeared on canvas has a particular acoustic quality, revealing the work process, a kind of narrative. These sounds are recorded, along with the artist talking about his or her inspiration for the piece being made. The recorded sounds and the voice of the artist are used to create a musical sound installation displayed in a container for the artist's work. The artwork itself is secondary to the sounds used for the installation, therefore the by-product of the noise becomes the subject of focus, while the finished objects of art are secondary. 

Talking Melody-Singing Story (2016) was done as Brody's Artist-in-Residence project for the Munich Kammerspiele. The piece is based on an opera's two main components, the aria and the recitative. For Talking-Melody, Brody recorded singers recalling the moment they discovered that their voices were special. The stories are used to create arias based off the voice-melodies of the singers. For Singing-Story Brody recorded people in three different cities describing what opera is to them. The answers were accompanied by a recitative accompaniment, and the interviews include vocal stars Anna Prohaska, Laurent Naouri and Lorin Sklamberg. A mini opera house was built to contain the installation. The Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

Talking Melody - Singing Story'. Der knapp zwanzigminütige Hörfilm des amerikanische Musikers Paul Brody reißt die oft so perfekt inszenierte Oberfläche der Kunstform Oper auf, lässt etwa Sänger intim plaudern oder befragt Strafgefangene in Alabama zu ihrem Verhältnis zur Oper, genauso wie deutsche Passanten… Brodys Klanginstallation fängt diesen Moment des Intimwerdens wunderbar auf: Opernsänger, die über ihre ersten bewussten Erfahrungen mit ihrer Stimme plaudern - die meisten dieser Sängern fangen dann prompt an, Kinderlieder zu singen - nicht erzwungen, mehr als klangliches Beispiel für ihre Anekdoten.

— Süddeutsche Zeitung July 8th 2016. online

Voices of Help (2016-2017) was a three-room documentary sound installation at the Youth Museum Berlin. The piece explored concepts of help through interviews with community and social workers around Berlin's so-called Rote Insel, or Red Island, an erstwhile socialist stronghold in Schöneberg. The recording of each voice received an instrument that brought out the personal qualities of the interviewees. The first room was dedicated to hearing the stories of how helpers began; the second explored the tools of professional social workers through collected narratives; the third investigated those expanding the system of help, mostly by volunteering to help refugees in ways meaningful to the helpers themselves. The exhibit was inspired by a Studs Terkel-like curiosity about the neighborhood—where Brody lives—the knowledge that help is not as prominent in US-American culture as it is in Germany, and by the people who had helped Brody's mother decades before when she escaped Nazi Vienna on a Kindertransport (Children's train) at age 13.

Radio art and documentary work

Between 2007 and 2012 Paul Brody produced a series of children's radio features about young people in different countries who are involved in music. The series portrayed not only the musical ideas of young performers and composers, but reflected on their social and cultural life as well and its implications for their music. 

In the WDR (West German Radio) series ‘Musikselbermachen' ('making music yourself') (2007-2008) Brody also worked with young narrators who presented the features. From 2010 to 2012 Brody continued the project for the SWR series ‘Klangküche' ('sound kitchen'. The young musicians, playing a variety of styles, hailed from Guatemala, Canada, the United States, and Eastern and Western Europe. 

In 2013 Brody produced a short piece for the Berlin Stories series of National Public Radio, entitled How I didn't meet Diana Ross.

In 2014 he produced The Fringe Sound of Berlin, a full-length feature exploring the culture of sound in the capital. How does the city sound? And how does the city's mentality affect its musicians? The feature includes interviews with architects such as Barkow Leibinger, Christine Edmaier, writers Leslie Dunton-Downer, Robert Beachy, and Carol Scherer; and musicians David Marton, Marie Goyette, David Moss, Daniel Dorsch, Wolfgang Müller, and Jochen Arbeit from the Einstürzende Neubauten. 

In 2014 Brody helped develop the three part series ‘Made in America' for WDR. He wrote and produced the road trip feature Southern Discomfort– A Jew from Oklahoma for the series. It explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and Southern American culture through the life of legendary bassist and songwriter Mark Rubin.

In 2016 Brody wrote and produced Most Wanted Poets, Escape from Alabama Prison, a WDR radio feature exploring the effect of art on poetry in the harsh environment of the Alabama prison system. 

In 2017 Brody produced a WDR feature exploring cultural perspectives of the German constitution and transformed his Munich Kammerspiele Artist in Residence project, Talking Melody-Singing Story, into a radio art piece for Deutschlandradio.

Performance art

Breaking from the performance traditions of classical and jazz trumpet, Brody fuses his work with language, art and melody into his trumpet playing. His solo techniques often involve movement, utilizing the performance space, creating sounds, and drawing melodic inspiration from speech rather than traditional melodic ideas. The rich experimental theater scene in Berlin led him to the director David Marton, who is well known for his music theater experiments. In the Marton ensemble Brody works as a performance artist, fusing trumpet improvisation with spoken word and acting. The group has enjoyed long stints at theaters such as MC93 House of Culture in Paris, the Schaubühne and Volksbühne in Berlin, the Chekhov International Theatre Festival in Moscow, and Burgtheater in Vienna. He gave voice-melody performances in various museums and galleries, including the Jewish Museum, Berlin and Häusler Contemporary in Munich. In 2016 Brody was Artist in Residence for the Munich Kammerspiele Opera Department, where he played a singing roll on the trumpet for an experimental production of La Sonnambula.

Composition and band projects

In 2002, through a Berlin Council Arts Grant, Brody formed his best known ensemble, Paul Brody's Sadawi. The group has performed extensively in the United States, Canada, and Europe and has recorded seven albums for US-American, German, and Polish labels. Originally the group explored the crossroads of contemporary jazz and traditional klezmer. Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Walter Benjamin also inspired many of the compositions. They can be heard on the three albums recorded from 2002 to 2007 on the Tzadik Label. 

Paul Brody is a remarkable trumpet player, composer, arranger based in Berlin [...] he brought together some of the best players from both the U.S. and Germany to create a new Jewish supergroup. The music combines exciting arrangements, catchy tunes, and compelling solos into another classic of the new Jewish Renaissance [...] Brody is forging a new Jewish jazz for the 21st Century.[...]

— John Zorn^[1]

In 2014 the group began exploring what Brody calls an “Indie Jazz cinematic sound” and signed with Enja Records. They recorded the album Behind All Words, dedicated to the poetry of Rose Ausländer. The CD presents extended compositional techniques with electronics, strings and vocals featuring Meret Becker, Clueso, and Jelena Kuljic. The CD won the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik Bestenliste in the “Grenzganger Kategory” (German Recording Prize Best of List 2014). Sadawi's second album on Enja, Vanishing Night, is inspired the by literaturary and theater works of Mary Cappello, Czesław Miłosz, and David Marton. Along with Sadawi, Brody has performed and recorded both solo and in collaboration with many artists, including John Zorn, Kent Nagano, Wim Wenders, Blixa Bargeld, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Orb, David Moss, Tony Buck, Shirley Bassey, Ran Blake, Alan Bern, Frank London, and Michael Rodach, Clueso, 17 Hippies, Semer Ensemble, The Other Europeans, Danial Kahn and The Painted Bird, Barry White and The Gincident.