[Dixielandjazz] THE JAZZ AGE - THE MUSIC OF ,PAUL WHITEMAN

[Steve barbone]

WOW!!! The Lincoln Center Jazz Band plays music from the Jazz Age including
Paul Whiteman. Damn, that Marsalis feller has one-upped the Moldy Figs once
again. Does the AFJS know about this? :-) VBG

And Bill Gunter / Jerry Gordon . . . They even played "Washboard Blues".

And Vince Giordano was there too? Further proof that Italians are "THE
ULTIMATE JAZZERS". :-) VBG.

I don't know about the rest of the List Members, but I applaud Wynton
Marsalis and LCJB for this program, as well as many others over their short
history, that have increased the visibility of both OKOM and Jazz. The man
has done more for the genre in 10 years than the rest of us combined in our
lifetimes. 

Fellow band leaders, you can still catch the wave. As I posted shortly after
the Ken Burns Jazz Program hit TV, the climate for "Jazz" has not been this
favorable since 1950.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone



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February 19, 2005 - NY TIMES - by BEN RATLIFF
MUSIC REVIEW | 'THE JAZZ AGE: MUSIC OF PAUL WHITEMAN'

A 20's Bandleader With an Ear for the Symphonic

Paul Whiteman has really taken it on the chin over the years: dismissed as a
popularizer who loaded his dance band with seven violins, as a deflator of
Bix Beiderbecke's creative spirit, as an unswinging slickster who was being
hailed as "the King of Jazz" when Louis Armstrong was practically inventing
the then-and-future style of jazz improvisation.

And you wouldn't expect to find his defenders in the Lincoln Center Jazz
Orchestra simply because so much of the Whiteman band's music sits apart
from the rest of jazz. Its top-level musicians could play jazz to a degree -
and a few were great - but many were by necessity based in classical music
so that they could play what was then called Whiteman's "symphonic jazz."
Some of the Whiteman band's work is distinguished by the great arrangers,
musicians and singers he hired, including Bill Challis, Don Redman,
Beiderbecke and Bing Crosby; some of it is conceptually ambitious. But the
swing feeling that Armstrong and others pioneered was, by and large, another
animal.

It is true, though, that Whiteman's vision to merge jazz with long-form
classical music and areas in between (like Gershwin, whose "Rhapsody in
Blue" his band performed in 1924), is the first prototype for the
cross-discipline, high-visibility work that Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at
Lincoln Center have accomplished. Armstrong might have done immeasurably
more for the sound, but when a major newspaper in the mid-1920's wanted to
call on someone to defend jazz as a music of complexity and seriousness, it
contacted the charismatic Whiteman, as it would call Mr. Marsalis now.

"The Jazz Age: Music of Paul Whiteman," which opened on Thursday night, is
about Whiteman in his context. Nearly half the program consisted of songs
from contemporaneous black bands of the 20's, including Duke Ellington's,
Jelly Roll Morton's and Fletcher Henderson's - music in which the Lincoln
Center band could show its ensemble tightness, and the soloists could let
rip. The Whiteman-band music that the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra did
play, mostly arranged by Challis, came from the hotter end of its enormous
output. There was no "symphonic jazz," and Vince Giordano's crooning on
songs like "Louisiana" was as close as the concert got to the goopy
geniality of that era's "sweet" music.

"What Are You Waiting For, Mary?" contained context within itself: its trick
was to pit the sweet and hot styles against each other. The action flipped
back and forth between the violinist Andy Stein and the guitarist James
Chirillo, trilling sweetly, and the New Orleans-style jazz coming from the
other side of the stage, recreating parts once played by a version of the
Whiteman orchestra that included Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer.

In one of the concert's best moments, Mr. Marsalis sang Hoagy Carmichael's
"Washboard Blues" - the only recording Carmichael made with Whiteman - in a
quiet, raspy voice, with an arrangement for six clarinets, violin and piano.
It wasn't typical Whiteman, typical Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra or typical
anything. But it was very nicely done.

The program repeats tonight at the Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall,
Broadway at 60th Street, (212) 721-6500.