Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Chapple
Hi Josh, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I started playing saxophone in grade 6, but didn’t really take it seriously until my freshman year of high school when I heard the lead alto for my top jazz band play. Before that, I had heard recordings of professionals, but hearing that quality of music played live in person, and by someone who I could learn from, lit a fire under me. My band director was also a driving force, who would constantly push me to become a better player. Wanting to further my craft, I went to University of North Florida, where I was showing rapid improvement until COVID happened. Because jazz is such an interactive music, zoom classes didn’t really work for teaching it, there were very few opportunities to play it, and even less opportunities to interact with my fellow classmates. This all lead to one of my biggest periods of musical burnout, lasting all the way halfway through my sophmore year to around halfway through my junior year.
The 2 main things that helped me get out of this burnout was the game Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and the previous director of Studio Jazz Writing, Gary Lindsay. Over the summer between my Sophmore and Junior years, I played the game Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which to this day is still my favorite game of all time. The after credits scene particularly stuck with me, and made me realize that I wanted to write music that could affect people the way the end credits song affected me. I then decided, as a tribute to the game and because I was hearing some really cool ideas on how to arrange the tune in my head, that I would write an arrangement of it for big band. A couple months after I wrote the arrangement, Gary Lindsay did a residency at our school for the Great American Jazz series, I was able to get an arranging lesson with him, and after looking at my arrangement of Battle Theme from Torna, he said I was a natural. I’ve always had a really hard time accepting compliments(mostly out of the suspicion that people were just saying them to be nice), but you don’t say “you’re a natural” to just be nice. This is what really sparked my love for writing/arranging jazz.
After this, I would constantly bring in new charts to be played by University of North Florida’s Jazz Ensemble 1, and took lessons from Gary on the side, who would always give me a lot of helpful commentary on how I could improve my writing. We had a few more composers come to UNF through their Great American Jazz series, but Gary was who I learned from best, as I find it’s the most helpful for me when I am flat-out told what does/doesn’t work in a composition or arrangement. I wanted to get even better at writing, so I decided to pursue my master’s specifically in Jazz Composition. At every university I got past prescreening for, I asked the director of the program if there was anything I could improve on in my application. Steve Guerra’s(professor of Studio Jazz Writing at University of Miami) answer really stuck out to me. “Yes, there are always improvements to be made, that’s why you should come here”. Based on that response, and the lesson I had with him which was similar to how Gary taught(telling me what I can improve upon instead of just being “what do you want to work on today”), I decided to go to University of Miami.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has most certainly not been a smooth road. I struggle really badly with social anxiety, which is terrible for anyone in such a connections driven industry as music. While being the stereotypically socially anxious introvert lends itself really well to writing music, it is a very large roadblock in having said music be played. Especially since the main genre I write requires an ensemble of 17 people. Couple this with me also having the social battery of a houseplant, and writing charts that even professionals struggle with, and it becomes really hard to find people that want to play my music. Thankfully, the internet age has made it easier to be reclusive while still getting your name out there, and I’m getting better at interacting with people I don’t know super well, but a lot of the time it still feels like I’m trying to ice skate uphill.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
As someone who writes almost exclusively in the large jazz ensemble genre, what sets me apart from the pack the most is how much of my music is inspired by metal. The integration of metal into large jazz ensemble is a very new trend, and isn’t done by most new composers. There are a few jazz composers who use it a lot (Kyle Athayde, Miho Hazama, Jon Hatamiya), who all coincidentally happen to be some of my favorite composers. However, I want to take it a step further. Most of these have a section that is metal, and then the rest of the tune is some other feel. While most tunes I wrote before this interview were like this, in the future I plan on writing a tune that’s exclusively metal the entire way through.
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
Honesty. As a kid, I would always be immensely frustrated when my parents would say “because I said so”. The idea that there was some secret reason that they wouldn’t actually tell me was infuriating. While they haven’t had to say that to me in at least a couple years, I still really appreciate when someone tells me exactly what they think without dancing around it. I’m naturally a bit of an airhead, so if you try to dance around the issue, I probably won’t get it. Please just tell me straight up.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/joshchapple
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chapple_not_chapel/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@joshchapple9435
Image Credits
James Hogan
Savannah Marie
