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The Sounds of Surprise By LOREN SCHOENBERG
In a recent New York Times review, Joel Sachs received kudos for his New Juilliard Ensemble—and, as the critic noted, "What could better test a student ensemble's mettle than a public program just a couple of weeks into the school year of rigorous, stylistically varied scores that they are guaranteed never to have encountered before?"
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| Harold Arlen |
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Victor Goines and the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra will be mounting the same hurdle, albeit with several more weeks under their belt, twice this month in an ambitious pairing of programs that run the gamut of jazz composition. The relative amounts of improvisation and composition will vary, not only from piece to piece, but from concert to concert. The first—"The American Songbook, Volume II," on October 4—will feature small ensembles and arrangements of classic songs written by the students themselves. They will encounter the formidable challenge of bringing to life music written decades before they were born. Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, Art Tatum, Wynton Marsalis, and many other jazz greats have already put their stamp on this repertoire. The composers represented in this concert include Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael, and Harold Arlen, each of whom took different things from the jazz experience. Finding a new setting that at once respects the contours of the original and also rhymes aesthetically with how the music has currently evolved has these budding jazz musicians experimenting with all sorts of compositional devices. They range from relatively literal treatments of the pieces as they were originally conceived to variations that border on the abstract. So, in a sense, the component pieces of this concert can be seen as creating a compositional mosaic of their own, and that's not even allowing for what the various soloists will spontaneously add to the mix on the evening of the concert.
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| Hoagy Carmichael in 1948. |
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That's what is at the root of jazz music—the "sound of surprise," as the writer Whitney Balliett once eloquently put it. But too many times this fosters the illusion that jazz musicians pluck their ideas out of the air, with little forethought. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are constantly honing their improvisatory schemes with new compositional devices, with many sets of variations in the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic spheres. But what makes it all work is a sense of theme and variations; without that, jazz, like many other types of music, can easily devolve into formlessness. Form here is used in the sense that the composer/educator Ernst Toch used it in his classic The Shaping Forces in Music. Form with a capital "F" referred to music that had an intrinsic unity, regardless of what formal manifestation it took. Form with a small "f" stood for music that had all the rhetorical external trappings but which was hollow at its core. The thrilling thing about jazz at its best is that the musicians involved don't know what is going to transpire when they walk onto the bandstand. In a jazz ensemble, any one of the members can be the instigator or catalyst who takes the performance in an entirely new direction.
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| Richard Rodgers (Photo courtesy of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization) |
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And while this sort of "in the moment" jazz is more readily associated with small ensembles, where the music is generally more fluid, it can also strike when a larger ensemble is playing. The best big bands—let's not forget that the big band is the American equivalent of the European symphony orchestra—played music that was tailored to their individual strengths. The most brilliant example of this during the last century (doesn't that sound strange?) was Duke Ellington's band. Ellington took inspiration from a player's style, and turned what—in another context—might have been seen as a limitation into a thing of genius.Throughout the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra's "New Notations: Juilliard Jazz Originals and Arrangements" on October 11, you will be treated to music written for big band by young musicians thoroughly schooled in the traditions of the idiom, but each of whom has a decidedly contemporary attitude. I have heard several of the pieces in rehearsal, and can testify that not one could be mistaken for music of the past, although some bear more of a relationship to the way things were done than how they necessarily are done today. And that is what will make the concert such a varied presentation. Soloists with the musical resources of the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra members are able to take you through all the eras of jazz within a single solo, and part of the excitement in encountering the band in a live performance is following how they integrate these variations into the larger compositional frame.
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Juilliard Jazz Ensembles
Paul Hall
Monday, Oct. 4, 8 p.m.
Juilliard Jazz Orchestra
Juilliard Theater
Monday, Oct. 11, 8 p.m.
Free tickets available in the Juilliard Box Office.
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Orchestras, like sports teams, ebb and flow as their personnel changes; you will be encountering several new faces in the orchestra this year, and that's all for the good. What it means is that America's premier jazz education program is thriving and that succeeding generations are making themselves felt. Remember when you walk into the concert hall to hear either event that you will be hearing music never heard before, and never to be heard exactly in the same way again. There's something intrinsically American about that, no?Loren Schoenberg, who teaches jazz history, has been on the faculty since 2001.
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