A Big Band Reaches for Bold Sounds



By BEN RATLIFF Published: December 1, 2009

Writing decent music for a jazz big band is hard, and keeping the band working is harder. For the bandleader and composer, maintaining the integrity of a group sound with a dozen or more players - and maintaining a core style with enough tooth and identity that it can reach beyond the closed circuit of jazz students - takes up a lot of the job. As a consequence, concertgoers don't usually expect a jazz big-band show to rearrange their heads.



 



People forget that big bands have been places of real aesthetic boldness. Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Bill Finegan, Bill Russo, Gil Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, Gerald Wilson, Muhal Richard Abrams, Maria Schneider: these were and are no slouches, and there are clear signs that a few younger composer-arrangers will join that list. Let's start with John Hollenbeck, whose 20-piece Large Ensemble played a superior show at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village Monday night. His music was playful, profound, attentive to the soloists' strengths and pretty much continuously imaginative - even though the band hadn't had a gig since March.

Like most of the people on that list, Mr. Hollenbeck uses strategies in his music that don't necessarily come from the core of the jazz tradition and uses them well enough to extend that tradition. Not just bits of writing, but instrumentation, too: among the sources of sound in Monday's set were English horn, marimba, glockenspiel, crotales (small, tuned, bell-like sets of cymbals played with mallets), digital loop machine and smartphones.

The concert drew from a new album, "Eternal Interlude," Mr. Hollenbeck's second record with the big band. (He spends more time in a smaller group, the Claudia Quintet, and his show at Le Poisson Rouge opened with two other ensembles he's been getting off the ground: a trio with the classical violinist Todd Reynolds and the vibraphonist Matt Moran, and Future Quest, a band dedicated to the repertory of Meredith Monk.) After its predecessor, "A Blessing," "Eternal Interlude" represents a major step forward. It's richer, better developed and more aggressively orchestral; its strangeness isn't self-conscious. It's the sound of a composer who's really grown into himself.

As a drummer Mr. Hollenbeck is contained and steadying. He doesn't swing much in this group, though there's so much else going on that's rhythmically interesting - rolling arpeggiated chords, tremelos, marches, fast-over-slow, cross-rhythms, hints of Steve Reich and gamelan and Indian hand drumming. But he probably got closest to jazz-as-we-know-it in "Foreign One," a kind of creative mistranslation of Thelonious Monk's "Four in One." It focused on and exploded small details of the original's frenetic theme, set it up verbatim over low unison horns, allowed a tenor saxophone solo to arise, cut back and forth between glimpses of Monk and other agendas.

"Perseverance" - which, Mr. Hollenbeck said, he wrote toward the end of the presidential race when campaign-trail speeches and recriminations were in the air - was all conflict, bluster and queasiness: a steady gallop of rhythm, battling tenor-saxophone solos by Tony Malaby and Ellery Eskelin, moments of percussionless drift and unease with long notes from the vibraphone (played with bows against the edge of the keys), and finally an intricate, beautifully constructed drum solo.

But the stunner, and the evening's most unquantifiable music, was the record's title piece, 20 minutes of high and wide ambition, full of foreshadowings and echoings, the natural world and the digital world. Theo Bleckmann, singing high tones wordlessly, sometimes through a digital octave shifter and a sampler, helped establish a serene melody. The rhythm dropped out for a few stretches as the piece moved along, once for Mr. Bleckmann to build up a weave of vocal sounds and once for Gary Versace to play a solo organ cadenza.

Then the band rejoined for the final section, first in a slow, pastoral ensemble passage then breaking off in parts to produce short, birdlike phrases. (Those who weren't playing took out their phones instead, activating the voice-recording function for an as-yet unclear purpose.) Eventually, the phrases mashed together and became one bar-length phrase, repeated and aggressive, an unbroken steamroller; and as that abated, the phones, held up to the microphones, replayed the original bird-song phrases in a faint, disjointed echo, all other sound fading away. This is the kind of thing that could provoke laughter from an audience, but I don't recall any. It was too logical and beautiful to be funny.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/arts/music/02hollenbeck.html?_r=3

John Hollenbeck on iLike - Add iLike to your MySpace

This is John....among other duties(like composer and drummer) I'm usually the van driver.  Welcome to our myspace page!  I'm still a virgin myspacer, so feel free to let me in on any myspace hipster info.  The main reason why I'm taking the time to do maintain this space is, that I believe in this band and would like more people to hear us. We have been together for 9 years and throughout that time we have forge a strong musical and personal bond.  I think you can hear this. In the jazz/creative/etc. world a long-lasting "band" is a unique entity, so listener support and interaction really helps us keep it going.  Peace, John