Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Don't Be Afraid...The Music Of Charles Mingus (2005)

It was released in 2005, but it was recorded in 2003, at the same time as this one. It's their most recent release to date (that I know of).

In some ways it's their most puzzling release. As a jazz modernist (I know, all jazz is modern), he's as daring a choice as Coltrane, but then again, since he often wrote for a large lineup, maybe he's not: of all the modernists he's the best fit (unless they want to tackle Gil Evans's work for Miles) (hey, now there's an idea). So why do him? Of course they started out mostly recording Ellington, who was a perfect fit, not an adventurous choice at all; but then again, Ellington was due for a revival, and most of his recordings had been made with primitive technology: for the sonic upgrade, if nothing else, he was worth doing. But Mingus? His records still sound good today. So again: why do him?

I've got no answer. I'm just familiar enough with Mingus to know the above facts (plus, that he's awesome), and not familiar enough to tell you if they're doing anything radical with his stuff here. But I can say: it sounds good, and preserves the humor and weirdness of Mingus's music, if not quite the soulfulness. What I've heard of Mingus never sacrifices grit for glitz; this sometimes does.

So: I've now listened to all of the LCJO's records (except for the ones where they're just Wynton's backing band, playing nothing but his compositions: I figure those belong in a different category). What do I think?

I think they're best experienced live. In concert it becomes clear that their mission is the thing: to present a broad cross-section of the history of jazz, and to do it with a lineup big enough and versatile enough to do it all some justice. And bringing it all together like that, the Duke next to Wayne Shorter, WC Handy next to Fred Rogers next to Dizzy Gillespie, it all makes a certain kind of sense, and of course the music itself is fine.

On record, they haven't quite figured out the best way to present themselves. The discs devoted to the ouevre of a single artist are spotty and even at their best it's hard to think of a truly persuasive reason for their existence. I think their most successful records are the two that just draw from their tours, with eclectic track selections and this historiographical aspect of their work in full swing (pun intended). If they had just released one record a year, documenting each year's repertoire, I'd probably buy them all. That would be something. It might even go further toward making the case for them as an artists' collective to be reckoned with, rather than the combination tourist attraction/PBS special that they seem to be thought of as now.

Then again, that seems to be working out for them. So.

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: A Love Supreme (2004)

This, as Pigpen once said, is gonna suck real good.

A big band version of A Love Supreme? You've got to be kidding, sez I.

And parts are just as bad as you'd expect. The "Psalm" section is glitzy, pretty, Sunday-best-suit religious rather than earnest, raw, mountaintop-sweaty spiritual as it should be. Elsewhere there are sections where Coltrane's gorgeous probing melodies are rendered with all the sensitivity of muzak.

But for every tin-eared passage there's one that, unexpectedly, works. They respect the polyrhythms, they do the best they can to translate Coltrane's sheets of sound into sheets of sounds, plural, and every once in a while they really make you sit up and take notice. Like at the end of the "Acknowledgement" section. This is where Coltrane and co. start chanting, sounding frankly pretty sick. Marsalis and co. render this as a conversation between every horn and woodwind in the band, each repeating the "a love supreme" melodic figure in a different register and voice, with the clarinet playing this weird, quasi-Eastern sounding improv behind it. At first it sounds silly, then it sounds fun, then it sounds just plain brilliant.

I've said it before: I like ambitious failures better than safe successes, usually. Inevitably, I like this. I commend it. This is the kind of stuff the LCJO should be trying on record.

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: Live In Swing City: Swingin' With Duke (1999)

So this release makes me want to take back some of the sanguine things I said about the LCJO in my review of They Came To Swing. This is a pleasant enough record, but I don't see much argument for its existence. LCJO had already done Ellington once. That was a satisfying disc, and a good starting point for a recording program by this outfit. But the direction their next two discs took was a promising one, mixing jazz from many (not quite all) eras together, demonstrating their credo that "all jazz is modern," making Monk and Coltrane rub shoulders with Jelly Roll Morton and Dizzy Gillespie and the Duke. But a few years later, here they are releasing another all-Ellington album. Why?

It's a pleasant enough disc, as I say. Good, polished renditions, with some very nice moments here and there, such as the last number, "Portrait Of Louis Armstrong," where Marsalis's delta-dragging trumpet is juxtaposed against some very McCoy Tyner-ish playing by pianist Cyrus Chestnut.

But on the whole the disc is just not as eye-opening as the first, because it doesn't try as hard to revive obscure, epic, late Ellington. A lot of the selections are pretty standard. And yes, I realize this began as a PBS project, not a full-scale recording project. But still...

No, no "but still." I think the PBS connection is probably the clue. The "Great Performances" episode this documents was 1999; "Ken Burns' Jazz" was just around the corner. It's hard not to hear this as part of a reactionary turn. A shrinking of at least the recording side of the LCJO's sense of mission - a shrinking of the outfit's conception of what jazz is.

Jazz at Lincoln Center: They Came To Swing (1994)

This seems to have been a companion piece to The Fire Of The Fundamentals. That one sampled what happened at Lincoln Center; this one samples what happened when LCJO went on tour. This is the only one of their discs I bought in real time, btw; I got it not long after seeing the show I mention here.

Like the last one, and like an LCJO concert, it's split between full orchestra numbers and spots by smaller combinations of orchestra members.

Standout numbers:

"Light Blue." A great big-band arrangement of this Thelonious Monk tune. They preserve Monk's lurching rhythms, but add some lush horn harmonies. Then the solos start. First we get a brown-paper-bag trombone solo, and this is followed by a plunger-muted trumpet solo courtesy of Mr. Marsalis himself. What this means is that the New York hipster-jazz tune is effectively revealed to have all the potential for river-soaked New Orleans ooze within it. It's things like this that make the LCJO worth listening to.

"Jelly, Jelly." An exquisite rendering of the Billy Eckstine number. Somehow it manages to be both deep, knockabout bruise-blue and elegant at the same time. It's vocalist Milt Grayson's showcase, and he's a real marvel on these early LCJO records. He's got recital-hall diction and cello resonances in his voice, but those factors just make it all the more powerful, because unexpected, when he digs deep for a teeth-gritting blues like this. LCJO is black-tie jazz, anachronistic to be sure, but that invalidates the age, not the music.

"Things To Come." A pretty magnificent whack at Dizzy Gillespie's revolutionary number. Doesn't have quite the raw power of Dizzy's 1946 version, but still, Jon Faddis turns in a bumblebee trumpet solo that would do Diz proud. And that disintegrating ending. Nice.

Incidentally, this article pretty much sums up my take on LCJO, and why I think they're worth listening to. At one point their status as an argument couldn't help but overshadow their potential as a listening experience, but those days are over. Now it's hard to see them as anything but a net plus for jazz (edit: well, this guy disagrees). You may not agree with the idea that most of what happened between 1965 and 1985 was a wrong turn (I don't), but chances are your appreciation of any jazz, fusion included, will only be enhanced by a greater familiarity with Jelly Roll and Duke. And that's all Wynton's really saying in the end, isn't it?

Jazz At Lincoln Center Presents: The Fire Of The Fundamentals (1994)

So I'm in a groove (or is it a rut?) (sorry, Peart) with these Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra discs. Collect 'em all. This is their second, and it's not technically an LCJO disc; it's a compilation of things that happened during three seasons of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the organization's home stand, and this means that some of the tracks are by the home team, and some are by visitors.

The only Orchestra pieces proper - the only big band numbers, that is, - are the Charlie Parker number "Hootie Blues" (nice) and the inevitable Ellington, "Multi-Colored Blues" (nice, too).

But the highlights are not the Orchestra pieces, but two numbers by what seem to me to have been subsets of the orchestra, an octet and a septet, both led by Wynton Marsalis and largely if not entirely filled out with Orchestra members.

The first of these highlights is the number that kicks off the disc, the Jelly Roll Morton tune "Jungle Blues." This is just a monster groove, is all. Drums, piano, guitar, and tuba all mashing on the beat, with brass and clarinet getting just as filthy as they can. This is true Storyville stuff, real bordello blues, and with the pristine recording technology and room of the '90s you can begin to understand just how and why the old records were supposed to work. I mean, it's still possible to appreciate Jelly Roll Morton records today, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and all the rest of those New Orleans gentlemen, but here things become clear in a different way. You can hear the space and balance between the horns, the rhythm section, the one woodwind. It starts to color in a picture that was only in sepia before, of a wanton woman, that licorice stick, dancing shrill and sunken in siren abandon, surrounded by the gruff, gasping growls of the horns. So that's what it was all about. Always was.

The second highlight is much more on the spiritual side of the spectrum, a cover of Coltrane's "Dahomey Dance." I confess I haven't heard the original of this yet, but the cover is brilliant. Marsalis's trumpet is cool and focused, the saxophones manage to evoke Coltrane without sounding too much like they're trying to ape him, and the bass duel sends shivers up the spine. It doesn't scale the hot heights of delirium that Coltrane was wont to; rather it brings out the cool '60s vibe that was always implicit in his work, and more explicit in contemporaries like Horace Silver.

From Jelly Roll to Coltrane and several points in between: the diversity of the disc is an eloquent testimony to the mission of the LCJO. Persuasive, and that's key this time around, because the trappings of this disc, from the PBS-y cover art to Stanley Crouch's even-more-pompous-than-usual liner notes, give the project the whiff of the textbook, or the school field trip. Y'know, it's Culcher, and you kids better appreciate it. Luckily, the music gets beyond all that.

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis at the Hult Center, Eugene, September 17, 2009

Went to see the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (or, as Wynton Marsalis his very own self said from the stage, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra: is there a difference) last Thursday night at the Hult Center in swanky downtown Eugene.

Preamble: I don’t go to many concerts. I like music too much, and most concerts, at least of the rock variety, are pretty unmusical events, with lousy sound, noisy crowds, and harrowing atmosphere. Every once in a while I go to one, though, and as it happens this was my second time seeing the LCJO (or J@LCO). With Wynton Marsalis.

The first time was in 1995 or possible 1996, in the Marriott Center at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I was an undergrad there at the time. The concert, as I recall, was not very well promoted. I only found out about it a couple of days beforehand. I asked a couple of friends if they wanted to go, they said yes, and we bought tickets that afternoon. We got alarmingly good seats, for that late: not on the floor, but only a few rows up in the stands.

The warning signs were accurate, because when we showed up it turned out that almost nobody else did. In this college town of forty thousand or so, they hadn’t even sold out the floor. So everybody in the stands got to come down and sit on the floor. We got to sit in, if I recall, the second row. I was ashamed for my town, but also kinda glad.

And it was awesome. I didn’t know jazz from a hole in my head at that point, but I had a sort of ignorant worshipful reverence for it, particularly live, a seed that had been planted by reading Kerouac and watered by a summer full of jazz in Nagoya the year before (I saw Mukai Shigeharu, Yamashita Yôsuke, and Ônishi Junko in one glorious season). Tonight it… Well, let’s abandon that metaphor and just say it was a pretty damn electrifying concert that ended, if my memory serves me well, with Wynton and some of the other horns marching around the stage and the aisles in a sort of N’Awlins parade…

So, when Mrs. Sgt. T and I saw the ad for the performance in the Hult, we jumped on it.

A very different experience. The Hult is a nice place to see a concert: good acoustics, classy atmosphere, but with Eugene casualness and unpretentiousness. And the place was pretty full; not packed, but respectably populated. I didn’t feel alone, that’s for sure.

I know a little more about jazz at this point, but the tree is still kind of slender, not strong enough yet to really climb on to pick the higher-hanging persimmons. That is, I still managed to listen to them playing a slow bluesy thing in the middle and think it was a Mingus number, only to have Wynton explain afterwords that it was, in fact, a WC Handy blues. Dayum.

They were playing with us. In the first half, they did a song written by Fred Rogers. They followed this up with a Mingusy (I swear!) arrangement of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” This was a highlight actually, marked by some really odd rhythms and intriguing combinations of instruments – piccolo and muted trumpet, for example.

But the climax of the show, inevitably, was when they pulled out some Ellington to end with. A magnificant rendition of “The Tattooed Bride,” particularly nailing the clarinet fantasia at the end – you think Eric Clapton invented that furious beginning/ethereal ending thing with “Layla”? Wrong. And they followed this up with “Portrait of Mahalia Jackson.” Sweet Jesus, that was nice. Pure gospel soul grind in the jazz idiom.

So: good show.

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Portraits By Ellington (1992)

Picked this up because I'm going to see this outfit next week. Have one of the LCJO's albums, which I bought after seeing them once in '95 or so, and I always meant to pick this one up.

It was recorded live in 1991. It's old: back from when the LCJO was concentrating on (re)establishing Duke at the head of the classic jazz canon. Back when it was still concentrating on trying to (as Stanley Crouch put it in the notes to their next release) "create a viable jazz canon." I'm sure that's still one of their goals, but now they've moved on to include other composers. Duke's place is secure.

The whole album's good listening, but the centerpiece and masterpiece is the "Liberian Suite." Jaw-dropping, this. Twenty-seven minutes of slow-burn soul. What instrumentation! Solos for vocalist (Milt Grayson, sounding like a bow-tied version of Leon Thomas), clarinet, vibes, violin, and timpani, in addition to the standard saxes and brass (the best trumpet solo on the record, by the way, isn't by Wynton Marsalis: it's by Lew Soloff, in the suite).

And each one of these unusual instruments cuts deeper than the last. By the time you get to the timpani (yes, timpani) solo, you've been so worked over, body and soul, that the timpani doesn't have to thunder. It whispers. Who would've thought a timpani could make you want ot cry? This one does.

The only way to really judge this record would be with knowledge of Duke's original versions of these tunes. Not an easy thing, since many of these are rather obscure pieces, at least to a novice like me. I know I love what I'm hearing, but I haven't heard an Ellington recording of "Liberian Suite," so I don't know if what I'm loving is the performance or the composition. At this point I guess it doesn't matter. I think Duke's will be my next acquisition, which is probably mostly what LCJO was aiming for here.