Shaking the Rafters of Ozawa Hall
I enjoyed a conversation about the recently deceased Gunther Schuller over lunch with my former NEPR colleague John Montanari on Tuesday. (Click here for my memorial to Gunther.) A few hours later, I heard the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s concert at Tanglewood, which Wynton Marsalis dedicated to Schuller’s memory. He noted that Schuller became a major influence on him when he attended the Berkshire Music Center as a 17-year-old in 1978. He said it was a “transformative experience” to come under his tutelage there, and hailed Gunther for his “courage” and the “depth of his intelligence, his curiosity, and his openness” to music of all kinds. Implied in this was gratitude for Schuller’s advocacy of jazz as a music on equal footing with classical.
J@LC went on to shake the rafters of Ozawa Hall (filled to capacity inside and out) with idiomatically precise renditions of Benny Carter’s 1933 “Symphony in Riffs;” Duke Ellington’s 1930 “Mood Indigo;” and Don Redman’s 1932 arrangement of “I Got Rhythm.” If you’ve ever wished for better audio quality for jazz recorded in the 78 rpm era, or wondered what the bands sounded like in person, J@LC’s got the answer, right down to the pie-tin timbre of Ali Jackson’s cymbal work on the Gershwin standard. A concertgoer I heard behind me was probably one of many in attendance who marveled at seeing for the first time the unique combination of clarinet, muted trumpet, and muted trombone that Ellington employed on “Mood Indigo.” (This aspect of what Billy Strayhorn called the “Ellington effect” is seen in the wobbly video below from a recent concert in Buenos Aires.)
Wynton offered a concise primer on the role James Moody’s lyrical solo on “I’m in the Mood for Love” played in inspiring Eddie Jefferson to create the jazz vocal style known as vocalese. J@LC’s charming rendition deputized alto saxophonist Ted Nash to play Moody’s classic solo, and trombonists Vincent Gardner and Chris Crenshaw to sing the parts of King Pleasure and Annie Ross, respectively, on the hit recording they made of “Moody’s Mood for Love.” The first half concluded with Gil Fuller’s orchestration of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bebop,” which Fuller called “Things to Come.” Of the latter, it was hard to say who would have been the prouder, Gillespie or Gunther.
The thrill of hearing modern jazz orchestrated for big band always leaves me convinced that bebop would have enjoyed a more substantial hold on the public if the music had been more widely heard in an orchestral setting. The skeletal comping of pianists Bud Powell, Al Haig, Duke Jordan and others behind Charlie Parker and the era’s front-line soloists rarely fleshed out the music’s harmonic richness in the way of larger ensembles. But bebop’s edginess, combined with societal changes and economic constraints then in force, made it impossible for Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Claude Thornhill and other modernist leaders to sustain their own big bands beyond brief periods in the forties.
The second half of the concert featured compositions by J@LC orchestra members, including a mambo that bassist Carlos Henriquez composed for their tour of Cuba in 2010; a movement from Chris Crenshaw’s “God’s Trombones,” which is based on James Weldon Johnson’s Harlem Renaissance volume of sermons in verse; and a movement from Ted Nash’s Presidential Suite, which is based on speeches made by international leaders using the cadence and pitch of the words, in this case a 1947 address by India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, “Tryst With Destiny.” J@LC recently presented a concert of Wayne Shorter’s works, with Wayne himself as soloist; at Ozawa Hall, the band played Sherman Irby’s ravishing arrangement of Shorter’s “Contemplation.” The concert closed with a movement from Wynton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio “Blood on the Fields.” Duke Ellington’s influence remains pronounced in J@LC’s philosophy, in the programmatic themes of its compositions, and in the growling, plunger-mute expressiveness of its brass section and in Marsalis’s solo work in particular.
The trumpeter sounds as good as ever as his 54th birthday approaches on October 18, and despite the demanding solos he played over the course of the night, he remained seated in the trumpet section throughout. A genial host, Wynton provided substantial detail in his introductions of each work, credited the soloists, wise-cracked and chuckled, and displayed the levels of leadership, passion, and inventiveness consistent with his role as the most prominent exemplar of the music he so clearly loves.