Saturday June 17th, 2023, 5:00 PM – House of Hard Bop.
One hundred years ago, in 1923, trumpeter, composer and arranger Thad Jones (photo) was born. He grows up with his equally musical brothers, Hank (piano) and Elvin (drums). From 1954 to 1963 he plays in Count Basie’s orchestra, for which he also writes arrangements – an activity that he expands strongly after 1963. At the end of 1965, together with drummer Mel Lewis, he founded the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. This part-time ‘rehearsal orchestra’ becomes controversial and influential in the Big Band Jazz genre. Jones plays trumpet and cornet, composes and in particular arranges.
The line-up of the orchestra consisted of top musicians: Pepper Adams (baritone sax), Bob Brookmeyer (valve trombone), Hank Jones (piano), Richard Davis (bass), to name a few. They met every Monday night at New York’s Village Vanguard jazz club, a practice that remained intact after the sudden departure of Thad Jones in 1978, and after the death of Mel Lewis in 1990. They continued as the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Those regular Monday evenings remained in the agendas for a total of fifty years.
In 1966 Presenting Thad Jones/Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra (Solid State Records) is released, which you can listen to in full in this programme.
In Bob Brookmeyer’s ABC Blues, the band shows what it has to offer in terms of soloists and compositional quality in just over 12 minutes. Brookmeyer opens his piece with a ‘searching’ intro of bass and drums in free tempo. Then the horns stack tone on tone, culminating in a dissonant ‘cluster’ – a phenomenon that strongly refers to 20th-century composed art music.
Brookmeyer was very adept at combining sounds and techniques from contemporary “classical” music with jazz-based data. Bassist Richard Davis – excellent accompanist and technically very skilled soloist with a radiant, transparent tone – introduces a medium tempo blues above which the horns play the now well-known, ‘atonal’ tone series.
New details help the process further, and there follows an alternation of solos, often accompanied by a piano trio, and tutti sections in which the orchestra sometimes operates as a single, unirhythmic block, but also splits into several contrapuntal layers. New, unbluesy data continues to emerge until the reprise.
After the seven pieces of Presenting… there is still time for The Little Pixie, the opening of the 1967 album Live at the Village Vanguard. Thad Jones is responsible for composition and arrangement. Hard swinging, packed with extremely virtuoso ensembles, and here too a star role for bassist Richard Davis.
A festive finale!
House of Hard Bop – Eric Ineke
