If you've heard of Mike Mantler at all, it's probably as the name behind the Jazz Composers Orchestra, not as a trumpet soloist. That's fair. He was never a virtuoso in the Freddie Hubbard or Woody Shaw sense. What he was good at was building structures big enough to hold the chaos that players like Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry wanted to make, and then getting out of the way.

Mantler moved from Vienna to New York in the early 1960s and quickly found himself in the thick of the city's free-jazz underground. He and Carla Bley, who he married and worked with for years, co-founded the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association in 1965, which was less a band than an institution — a way to get large-scale, difficult, uncommercial music performed and recorded when nobody else was going to bother. The landmark release from that effort, The Jazz Composer's Orchestra (1968), is a monster: dense orchestral writing that keeps threatening to collapse into total improvisation, with a lineup that reads like a who's-who of the era's most fearless players.

His own writing is where things get interesting. Mantler liked contradiction — tight, almost classical composition rubbing up against total improvisational freedom, brass charts that sound vaguely militaristic next to solos that sound like they're falling apart on purpose. Later projects like The Hapless Child (1976), setting Edward Gorey texts to music, or his collaborations with Robert Wyatt on records like Movies (1978), pushed him further from straight jazz into something closer to art-song or chamber rock, always with that same interest in composed structure holding loose, strange material together.

He also ran WATT Works, the label that documented most of this, which matters more than it sounds — without it, a huge chunk of this music simply wouldn't have been recorded. Mantler isn't a household name, and he'd probably be the first to tell you he wasn't trying to be. But if you're curious about how far-out jazz composition got in the 60s and 70s, and who was actually paying to put it on wax, his name keeps showing up at the center of it.