As boldly as its title suggests, “Lickety Split: The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra Plays the Music of Jim McNeely” (New World) takes our notions of how a jazz big band can and should sound and shakes the living lickety out of them. In fact, the last time the orchestral language of jazz received such a welcome jolt may have been when the famed Miles Davis-Gil Evans album “Miles Ahead” was released–and that was way back in 1957.
The orchestral language of jazz, by the way, is not quite the same as the language of jazz as a whole. Or least it hasn’t been since the mid-1940s, when the end of the Swing Era coincided with the rise of the angular music called bebop, which was made for virtuoso soloists and quicksilver small ensembles.
The typical jazz big band is made up of three instrumental sections or choirs–trumpets, trombones and reeds (commonly saxophones) plus a rhythm section–with the number of players usually resting somewhere between 14 and 20. It’s a setup that virtually dictates the sort of music such bands will make–one that’s based on a communal, call-and-response interaction between the instrumental choirs and soloists and that builds those patterns of visceral excitement that are exemplified by terms like “flagwaver” and “shout chorus.”
Of course, there’s no law that says a jazz orchestra couldn’t be an ensemble of any instrumentation and a certain size that plays a music that audiences agree to call “jazz.” And some composers and arrangers (notably, Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Billy Strayhorn, Thad Jones and Bob Brookmeyer) have wanted and managed to give us more than the standard jazz big band tends to offer–more colors, more gradations of volume, more density of texture and event, more room to build complex, long-form structures.
It seems likely, though, that the style and makeup of the jazz big band will never cease to be linked to the kind of music that was played for dancing and listening in the 1930s and ’40s by the bands of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford and others–in much the same way that, in the classical world, it’s difficult to separate the concepts “symphony” and “orchestra.” And this is where McNeely and friends come in, for the music on “Lickety Split” manages to extend the jazz big band tradition into remarkably adventurous directions while leaving its earthy communal roots intact.
A Chicago product
Born in Chicago in 1949, McNeely attended Notre Dame High School in Niles and the University of Illinois and has worked as a pianist with the likes of Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Phil Woods and the ensemble out of which the current Vanguard Orchestra evolved–the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, which was founded in 1965, became Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra when cornetist-composer Jones left for Europe in 1979 and the Vanguard Orchestra when drummer Lewis died in 1990. (Jones died in 1986.)
Made up of 16 of New York’s top freelancers, the band has remained remarkably stable–half of its current members, including the leaders of the trumpet, trombone and reed sections, have been in place since the late 1970s. And this not only gives the Vanguard Orchestra the cohesiveness one might expect but also an ability to bring off things that another band might not even attempt.
For example, on one of McNeely’s pieces, “Mel”–a tribute to Lewis and a feature for the orchestra’s current drummer, John Riley–there is a passage where, as the composer explains, “the band listens to Riley’s 4- and 2-bar phrases and throws them back at him.”
Yes, that means that all the band’s pitched instruments instantly echo the swift, skittering patterns that Riley has just improvised, giving them a melodic shape as well as a rhythmic one–a feat that is imaginable if only a single horn player were involved but one that becomes almost mind-boggling when 13 instrumentalists must spontaneously arrive at the same musical conclusion. (“We have,” says McNeely, “tried this before.”)
If that passage seems a delightful stunt, rest assured that the Vanguard Orchestra has subtler, deeper effects at its command, ones that have evoked ideas of comparable subtlety and depth from the composer.
The album’s title piece, an uptempo feature for baritone saxophonist Gary Smulyan, is described by McNeely as “the result of a `What if?’ proposition. What if the baritone saxophone player in James Brown’s band started to o.d. on Woody Shaw, Sun Ra and Witold Lutoslawski? And one night he lost it and went completely over the line.”
Music with a sense of humor
Clearly, McNeely is a man with a sense of humor, and this piece–with it half-cracked blend of R&B funk vamps, harmonically athletic brass section leaps and exquisitely precise pontillistic textures–is at once very witty and a visionary transformation of the jazz big band tradition. While it swings like crazy and has moments of incendiary power, it’s also a eight-minute-long evolving drama–one whose key moment comes after an orchestral explosion when, as McNeely puts it, “finally the baritone sax re-emerges, in the way that the Apollo capsules used to re-emerge from radio silence after coming around the dark side of the moon, much to mission control’s relief.”
A similar vein of humor runs through “Sticks,” which evokes Ellington not only because the featured soloist, trombonist Ed Neumeister has a very modern take on the “talking” plunger-muted style made famous by Ellington great “Tricky Sam” Nanton, but also because of its dark, shape-shifting, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” moodiness. McNeely doesn’t imitate Ellington, but he certainly knows his Duke backwards and forwards: from “KoKo” to “The Mooche” to “The Mystery Song.”
A prayerful piece
Most impressive of all, though, and as serious as a piece of music can get, is McNeely’s “Absolution,” which springs from at least two different realities: the days the young McNeely spent as an altar boy and all the years, both joyous and penitential, that he and the rest of the Vanguard Orchestra have been part of one or another big band.
The featured soloist here is tenor saxophonist Rich Perry, and from the first his sound has a keening, prayerful edge to it, as though he were singing a song of woe both for himself and for unnamed others. And then the piece proceeds to name them, as an orchestral chorale is followed by what McNeely explicitly calls a “litany”: a passage in which short solo statements from each horn player in the band alternate with orchestral “answers” until, the length of the solos shrinking bit by bit, the band essentially swallows its own members.
It’s a magical effect and a very moving one, too–as though all the trials and rewards of the big band musician’s life had taken shape right in front of us, only to be resolved into a deep communal peace. And perhaps that’s the ultimate point that this lovely album has to make about the fate of the jazz orchestra–that such organizations will flourish as long as they manage to wrench communally into being a music that can be made in no other way.
