Hayes Greenfield is a jazz saxophonist, composer, educator, author, and electro-acoustic spatial sound artist who thrives on continually challenging his boundaries. Hayes has earned many awards, released numerous critically acclaimed albums, CD’s, and recordings, and traveled throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, performing at festivals, concerts, and clubs with his own bands.
Whether playing in acoustic settings or embracing today’s digital spatial technology by processing and recording his saxophone, flute, Kalimba, and voice through an extensive rig of guitar effects pedal and loopers, Hayes’ music is always personal, in the moment, and filled with rich, musical journeys that draws from his expansive musical history.
As a film composer, Hayes has scored more than 70 films, documentaries, commercials, and TV specials. Many of these have received awards, including an Emmy (George Marshall and the American Century) and two Tellys (The Nature of Modernism: E. Stewart Williams and William Krisel, Architect). Other notable films Hayes has scored include The American Nurse (2014), and PBS films America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero (2002), Return to Ground Zero (2006), Building Alaska (2010) and Alaska, the World, and Wally Hickel (2013). He has also composed for films documenting luminary artists Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Grace Hartigan, James Rosenquist, and Milton Glaser; architects Philip Johnson and Donald Wexler; United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins; The Berlin Airlift and Russia’s Future for the New Millennium.
As a jazz educator, in 1998, Hayes created his widely acclaimed Jazz-A-Ma-Tazz CD, and a highly, interactive jazz education music performance/workshop/professional development program. Jazz-A-Ma-Tazz has performed internationally for over 300,000 young people. Hayes received the distinguished New York University SCPS/GSP Marc Crawford Jazz Educators Award in 2005. In 2009, he released his second award-winning family album, Music for a Green Planet, which celebrates green, renewable, and sustainable energy.
Finally, as a sound artist and educator, over the last 30 years Hayes has developed and founded Creative Sound Play (CSP), an easy, accessible, common-sense-like method for all non-music teachers to engage and work with students making intentional sound and silence in deliberate ways. CSP helps all children to collaborate and develop their social emotional learning, active listening and executive function skills, mindfulness, empathy, and builds community. Hayes’ book Creative Sound Play for Young Learners was published by Routledge Taylor Francis in 2024 as part of their Eye on Education book series.
Photo Credit: Chris Drukker