[Dixielandjazz] Recent Silence Explained

[Ken Mathieson]

Hi All,

I've been reading DJML Digest recently but not contributing due to the extreme time pressure of writing charts for two hours' worth of music for the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival. Now that the gig is over and I'm partially recovered from chronic sleep and food deprivation, it's time to let listmates know what we got up to.

The concert marked the tenth anniversary of my Classic Jazz Orchestra as well as the launch of a new CD - Clarinet Gumbo - on Lake Records with Evan Christopher guesting with CJO to explore the twin themes of the New Orleans Clarinet Tradition and some of Jelly Roll Morton's last and unpublished compositions, which I had arranged for CJO's eight players plus Evan. The CD isn't officially released world-wide by the distributors until early September, but is already available to buy or download from Lake Records' website (http://www.fellside.com). Lake Records usually put their issues on Spotify, so if you're able to access Spotify, you can hear them there. 

The material on the CD represents the programme we played at last year's Edinburgh Jazz Festival, but for this year's concert we concentrated on the music of Jelly Roll Morton with a few pieces by other composers to provide contemporary comparison with some of the Morton pieces. We started the first half with CJO's usual line-up of trumpet, trombone, 3 reeds, piano, bass & drums playing my settings of Froggie More, Honey Babe (featuring Martin Foster on impassioned clarinet) and the "Spanish-tinged" Mama'Nita (featuring Dick Lee & Martin Foster on clarinets), before we brought on the first of our three guests from New Orleans, the splendid guitarist, banjoist and singer Don Vappie for Buddy Bolden's Blues. Don's great vocal was very evocative of Jelly's singing style and his banjo solo was a stunning display of virtuosity without sacrificing musical good taste, perhaps best described as a "tremolo storm!" It just shows what can happen if a banjo gets into the hands of fine musician! Don stayed on while we brought on our next guest, Duke Heitger on trumpet, to play Don Redman's great tune No One Else But You. This chart has been kind of reserved by us for Duke, as we only seem to play it when he's guesting and he did his usual consummate and fiery job on it. Next up was a number from the new CD, Dardanella, featuring Evan leading Dick and Martin in a swinging clarinet trio. Next was a slow, sombre version of Wild Man Blues featuring Duke, Evan, young trombone star Kevin Garrity and pianist Tom Finlay, before we finished the set with a riotous Black Bottom Stomp featuring everyone.

For the second set, we expanded CJO into a 15-piece big band of 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 4 saxes, clarinet, piano, bass, guitar and drums which we call CJO XL. For this part of the show, I had obtained some of Jelly's big band charts dating from the last two years of his life from the Historic New Orleans Collection, where the William Russell Collection is housed. For those who don't know the story, Jelly was trying to re-establish himself as a major figure in jazz after a tough time in the 1930s and to do that in 1939-40 meant having a swing era big  band. He wrote a complete library for it but only nine scores and band parts survive in HNOC, although there are incomplete score and parts fragments of several other numbers. It's a bit of a mystery where the missing charts went to, but I suspect collectors got their hands on them before Russell arrived to safeguard the rest. It's also a mystery that none of the scores and parts I've seen to date have any space for solos, so I suspect that Jelly was trying to re-establish his reputation, not as a player, but as a composer/arranger, possibly to show the world how big band jazz should be played.

We opened the second set with Stop and Go, which the CJO eight-piece with Evan had recorded for the new CD in my arragement, but for CJO XL I used Jelly's own score. In fact there is more than one score, as Jelly had clearly re-written the trombone parts from the score which was published in Russell's book Oh Mister Jelly! Next up was a score from HNOC of a piece with the working title of ZZ. It consists of five pages of voiced writing for brass and saxes, but on p5 it simply stops part-way through a section, so I completed the missing bars to form a section leading to solos and wrote a shout chorus based on Jelly's final main theme, as he would have done, to take it out. Since it was an unfiinished score, I suspect that this was its World Premiere. The next number, Ellington's Clarinet Lament, was Evan's choice for a feature and was my transcription of the Ellington's 1936 recording. That was followed by my chart on Morton's piano piece, Pep, which was originally written for the CJO 8-piece, but I had always felt it would be more suited to a big band, and so it proved: the capacity audience cheered it to the rafters.

The next number was another Morton rarity, There's a Sign on Her Window, which exists only as a piano part in HNOC, but was clearly intended to be a song. It has a somewhat rambling verse to set up a strutting chorus, but no lyrics seem to have survived, so I wrote a big band chart based on Jelly's piano copy and gave it a shout chorus to finish. That piece was probably written about 1939-40, but never published or recorded by Morton, or anyone else for that matter, so again I suspect this was a World Premiere. As a contrast, we followed that with a transcription of Ellington's gorgeous 1940 piece Dusk to show how different Ellington's compositional methods were from Jelly's by 1940. It's got some tricky writing for brass - tightly muted and very high - but the band produced a masterful reading of it and Duke Heitger and Evan contributed wonderfully appropriate solos.

One of the purposes of the concert was to demonstrate that Morton's music is timeless and, in the right hands, is robust enough to be arranged in styles which only emerged long after his death. I transcribed Gil Evans' chart on King Porter Stomp (from his album New Bottle Old Wine) to feature CJO's young tenor sax virtuoso Konrad Wiszniewski. He roared into the intro and brought the house down with his energy and invention and showed that Morton's composition is just as relevant today as it was when he wrote it way back in 1906. We closed the set with Morton's strange pseudo-oriental piece, Ganjam. Again, we had recorded this with Evan on the new CD, but in my setting for the small band. For the concert I had bought the orchestral parts published by Edition Peters (edited by James Dapogny), so it was Jelly's original setting, full of oriental scales and huge dynamic contrasts,  which we played. This brought a long, standing ovation and demands for an encore. The only piece we had left was my transcription of Bill Challis's arrangement of Clarinet Marmalade written for the Jean Goldkette Orchestra, but never recorded by them, although he had reduced it for the famous recording by Frankie Trumbauer's small band recording featuring Bix. Although it had nothing to do with Jelly, it still sent 500 happy souls out into a gloriously warm Edinburgh evening.

Apologies for the length of this piece, but I wanted to put on the record the details of an exhilarating concert with some wonderful solo and ensemble playing. None of this could have happened without the generous assistance of HNOC in providing some very rare scores, likewise Scottish Government funding to enable the preparation of the music and proper rehearsals, as well as Roger Spence of the Jazz Festival production team for supporting the project from the outset and pulling all the right strings behind the scenes to make it happen.

Cheers,

Ken Mathieson