Though most Americans don`t yet know it, there`s a jazz revolution brewing in Washington, D.C. that-in the next few years-could change the way we listen to the music.
Then again, it could fizzle within the next few months.
In the balance hangs nothing less than the future of jazz masterworks by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford, Bennie Moten, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and other jazz-band innovators.
For those who missed the opening shots, which have yet to be heard outside the nation`s capital, they were fired on May 17. With an overflow crowd packed into the Smithsonian Institution`s Carmichael Auditorium, the museum presented the debut of its Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, an ensemble created solely to revive lost, forgotten or otherwise neglected music by America`s jazz greats.
So what`s so special about a new band playing vintage music? In this case, quite a bit, because the band was playing music for which the original scores disappeared as long as seven decades ago. So in order for this ground- breaking concert to take place, works by Ellington, Basie, Henderson and the like had to be painstakingly transcribed from surviving recordings. Then the newly minted transcriptions had to be copied into separate parts for each orchestra player, then rehearsed to overcome technical hurdles and to capture the musical style of the day.
The glowing reviews from the Eastern press and the long lines that formed outside the Smithsonian for subsequent Jazz Masterworks concerts suggested that the Smithsonian was onto something.
”We couldn`t believe the response to what was really our first move, our demonstration project,” says Lester E. Schultz, who is executive director-as well as typist, secretary and you-name-it-for the recently created Jazz Masterworks Editions, which will publish the newly transcribed scores.
”We had 14-year-old kids in the audience screaming at the end of some of these pieces, we had old folks telling us they never thought they would live to hear this music again.”
The enthusiasm is relatively easy to understand, because no recording-certainly not the technically inferior ones of the `20s through the `40s-can capture the sonic splendor of orchestrations by Ellington, the muscular sound of works by Basie, and so on. Recordings, for all their importance in documentation, are but faint echoes of the real thing.
But the ramifications of the Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and the Jazz Masterworks Editions goes well beyond providing a few lively concerts for a relatively small audience.
For one, bringing the sounds of Ellington, Basie, Henderson, Lunceford, Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey and others back into performance ”makes their work a living music once again,” says David N. Baker, who, with Gunther Schuller, is co-musical director of the Jazz Masterworks Orchestra (as well as head of the jazz department at Indiana University`s School of Music).
”If music is left just to records, it`s not really a part of our daily life,” adds Baker.
”More than that, whenever people hear music by Sy Oliver or Duke Ellington these days, it`s almost always in an arrangement by someone other than the composer.
”So how would you feel about picking up a late string quartet of Beethoven, but hearing it in someone`s arrangement?”
Obviously, that would be considered a kind of musical sacrilege, and therein lies the problem: Jazz classics never have been granted the respect, let alone reverence, routinely accorded their classical counterparts.
As a result, ”There are so many major (jazz) compositions and arrangements that are virtually lost, because there was no mechanism to save them,” says Baker.
”So that`s what we`re trying to create here: A way to bring this music back. And it`s critical that we do. Unfortunately, a lot of people only run into music by Ellington or Henderson when it`s used as background for a Betty Boop cartoon. But this is serious music, and it deserves a lot better showcase.
”When our orchestra first played (Ellington`s) `Daybreak Express,` for instance, I couldn`t believe it. I`ve been listening to records of that piece since I was a kid. But hearing it live, the way Ellington wrote it, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I had no idea what that music sounds like for real.”
To purists who complain that no transcription is going to be identical to the original, Baker insists that ”our transcriptions are quite close. We can compare our work with, say, other scores by Ellington that have survived
(roughly 2,000 are stored at the Smithsonian), and we can make a very good judgment on what the composer might have done in this or that situation.
”And anwyay, hearing a transcription is a lot better than hearing nothing at all.”
If the Jazz Masterworks Editions takes off, the roughly 400,000 elementary, high school and college musicians who play in bands would be able, for the first time, to learn and play various jazz classics as they were originally conceived. And the concerts that have been so successful in Washington, D.C., could tour major American cities.
”If we really get going, we hope to take the Jazz Masterworks Orchestra as early as next season to two major cities: Chicago and New York,” says JME executive director Schultz, who also hopes to broadcast recordings of the Smithsonian concerts on National Public Radio in coming months.
The main question, of course, is money. Everything that has been accomplished thus far-concerts, transcriptions, promotions-has been achieved on Congressional grants of $242,000 for the orchestra and $82,000 for the publication of the JME scores.
”But we need $1 million to ensure our future,” says Schultz, who`s currently scouring the country for corporate and foundation contributions.
”Unfortunately, this is not an easy time to be looking for money. While a lot of established arts groups are trying just to hold on to what they have, we`re the new kid on the block. So even though we`ve shown there`s an audience and a hunger for what we do, it`s tough going.
”In our country we spend all this money, rightly so, to support European music: orchestras that play Beethoven and Brahms. But we don`t do likewise for our own music.”
Indeed, jazz never has enjoyed the institutional support that has been integral to classical music for well over a century in the U.S.
Yet there are subtle indications that even this aspect of jazz in America is on the verge of changing. Earlier this year, Lincoln Center in New York established a jazz performance and education wing; the Smithsonian`s new venture is on a similar mission.
Chicago, meanwhile, has nothing of the kind.
But the Smithsonian`s Jazz Masterworks orchestra and publications clearly hold out the most promise for national audiences, if its program can pick up the financial support.
”I think we`re on the threshold of something big here,” says Schultz, who expects that Congress will decide later this year whether or not to provide more funds.
”I just hope we get the money before we go out of business.”
