[Dixielandjazz] What Instruments should be used for Trad Jazz? (or Fugues)

[Steve Barbone]

Below article parallels a question that we see often on the DJML. What
Instrumentation should be used to play "trad" jazz. Relating it to Bach,
that same question (generating similar lack of agreement in the answers) has
been asked about his Fugues since 1740 or so.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

THE OBITUARY BACH WROTE FOR HIMSELF
NY TIMES - By STEVE SMITH - December 8, 2007

More than 250 years after Bach¹s ³Art of Fugue² was posthumously printed,
the work still poses questions that have only conditional answers. Was this
unfinished collection of 20 increasingly complex fugues and canons meant to
sum up a life¹s work? Probably, given Bach¹s failing eyesight during the
1740s.

Was it actually meant to be played? If so, by whom? Those are tougher
questions. Bach¹s score does not specify instrumentation. Some scholars view
it as unquestionably a keyboard piece; others claim the opposite. The work
has been successfully recorded by keyboardists (on both period and modern
instruments), viol consorts, chamber orchestras and saxophone quartets.

On Tuesday night the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center opened its
second Baroque Festival ‹ an event devised to provide context for its
traditional December traversals of Bach¹s ³Brandenburg² Concertos ‹ with a
performance of ³The Art of Fugue² at the New York Society for Ethical
Culture. The Orion String Quartet and the wind quintet Windscape, nine of
the finest musicians on the society¹s roster, used an arrangement made in
the early 1960s by the flutist Samuel Baron for the New York Woodwind
Quintet, of which he was a member, and the Fine Arts Quartet.

This concert was as much a tribute to Mr. Baron¹s ingenuity as to Bach¹s
original vision, whatever it might have been. Mr. Baron¹s combinations of
modern strings and winds, however ³inauthentic,² served the work with
unfailing musicality. . . .(snipped)