By Cam Lucadou-Wells
It’s slow, languid and sweet like the most glorious of mornings.
Sixteen-year-old Narre Warren North composer and sublime talent Nathan Iuoras’s 1940s-style jazz ballad Morning Song won the Monash University Emerging Jazz Composer Prize 2016.
The deeply-layered work harmonises soft strings, an angelic voice, muted horns and sax with a lilting percussion.
“It’s a standard orchestration for a ballad,” Nathan said.
“I was going for a laid-back type of sound.”
It was created while Nathan studied in this year’s Accelerando musical incubator program run by the Melbourne Recital Centre.
Nathan was the first and only composer accepted into the accelerated learning program, which took in just five musicians in this year’s intake.
The program has matured his compositions, he said.
His talented classmates inspired him with ideas and influences, while industry professionals have shared advice and insight.
Asked for a music preference, Nathan leans to Romantic classical and Latin jazz.
“I love far too much music, nearly every single genre. I can get something out of all of them.”
Listen to Nathan playing Morning Song.
Since he was a precocious five-year-old, Nathan nagged his parents to start piano lessons. He then took to it with aplomb.
At eight, he entered his first composition, Russian Puppets, which was runner-up for original composition at the 2009 Dandenong Festival of Music and Arts.
From then, there have been a stream of composition awards and he has flourished under piano teacher Grace Pinkowski and Nossal High School teacher James Mustafa.
Two of Nathan’s latest works will be performed by Accelerando musicians at the program’s private end-of-year concert.
