Peter Zummo

Writing in the British culture blog "The Ransom Note," Tim Wilson commented that some of Zummo's "most familiar" music was created with cellist Arthur Russell. Zummo played on most of Russell's recordings and produced several of them. Their collaborations in multiple musical styles included Russell's disco single, “Kiss Me Again.” In it, according to a review in The New Yorker, “phrases emerge and wrap around each other: Peter Zummo’s gorgeous trombone motif, Russell’s pizzicato cello theme, and a growing drone of loud, dissonant guitars…When the smoke clears, genre is just a memory.” In 2014, Zummo and longtime collaborators, bass player Ernie Brooks and percussionist Bill Ruyle, recorded Russell's This Love Is Crying with New Zealand musician and composer Liam Finn.

Russell, in turn, played often for Zummo, notably on the Bessie Award–winning composition Lateral Pass, created for a dance by choreographer Trisha Brown, with a stage set by artist Nancy Graves. In 2014, Foom Music, in London, released an original recording of this 1985 piece. According to Piccadilly Records, the CD demonstrated that “Zummo’s signature trombone style, renowned for its rich and soothing tone, has become one of the most beloved features of Russell’s celebrated sound."

In the fall of 2014, Mikhail Barishnikov's Baryshnikov Arts Center, in New York City, awarded a residency for the creation of new work to Zummo and Brooks. Additional support over the years has come from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and other funders.

In New York City, Zummo developed extended techniques for the trombone and other instruments and created many works, including several with his wife, then-choreographer and dancer Stephanie Woodard. For several years, he wrote music and performance reviews in the SoHo Weekly News. For a 2006 article by “Blue” Gene Tyranny in Dram, Zummo described his compositional approach as being about “persons not instruments,” elaborating that he provides “material for musicians and sufficient instructions, so they don’t make arbitrary but rather logical or heartfelt decisions.” His work, Zummo continued, thus “engenders a social situation reflecting modern society.”

Since 1967, Zummo's compositions exploring the rock, jazz, new- and electronic-music, disco, punk, and world-music idioms have been presented in venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop, and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, among many others in New York City, as well as in numerous additional spaces worldwide. The website of the music magazine Pitchfork called Zummo's music “the sound of sublimity…that sends shivers down the nervous system,” and in an interview with The Quietus, Scottish deejay JD Twitch (Keith McIvor) characterized Zummo's work as “sheer bliss.”

Peter Zummo (born 1948) is an American composer and trombonist. He has been described as "an important exponent of the American contemporary classical tradition." Meanwhile, he has been quoted as describing his own work as "minimalism and a whole lot more."