On strictly musical terms, Chicagoans have a great deal to be thankful for, starting with the important work of William Russo’s Chicago Jazz Ensemble.
As if to emphasize the point, the band (which is based at Columbia College Chicago) offered an array of musical riches Tuesday evening in the Getz Theater, on East 11th Street. The evening’s repertory, spanning more than six decades, touched on several key chapters in the history of big band jazz.
From the outset, though, there was no doubt that this evening was significantly different from the prototypical Chicago Jazz Ensemble concert. For starters, the plush costumery and theatrical lighting that have helped define the band’s concert work were set aside for a less formal approach.
Interestingly enough, the music-making also proved a little looser and more rough-hewn than usual. And though one wouldn’t want the Chicago Jazz Ensemble to let down its guard to this degree during every concert, there was a certain rambunctiousness to the performances that proved difficult to resist.
If Russo erred slightly in opening the evening with a technical tour de force, the perpetual motion “Second Line” from Duke Ellington’s “New Orleans Suite,” he and his players quickly got back on track. In the 1937 version of Ellington and Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” the band’s exquisitely blended reeds and the evocative, plunger-muted trumpet solos of Scott Hall suggested that the ensemble was adjusting to the acoustical demands of the room.
And by the time Russo and friends swung into Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Happy Go Lucky Local,” its brilliant orchestral effects boldly dispatched by the band, listeners were hearing the Chicago Jazz Ensemble in fine form. Even without such key players as trumpeter Orbert Davis and vocalist Bobbi Wilsyn, the ensemble produced passages of considerable virtuosity and stylistic authenticity.
Similarly, the band articulated the call-and-response patterns in “Ko-Ko” and the tricky tempo changes in “Rockin’ in Rhythm” (both by Ellington) with ease.
Russo also brought a new singer into the mix, Victoria Brady, whose creamy alto could not help but seduce the ear. Though Brady needs to learn to sustain intensity through the full course of a song, she clearly has the vocal equipment needed for the task.
Russo devoted part of the program to his own music, which dramatically showed how the man has evolved as a composer. The extremely thick, Stan Kenton-like orchestration of “Resist” (from `In Memoriam,” of 1966) offered a stark contrast to the ethereal “I Lift Up My Eyes” from Russo’s Chicago Suite No. 2 (1997) and “The Blue Note” from his Chicago Suite No. 1 (1994).
At nearly 70, Russo clearly is writing some of his best work in the jazz idiom.
