Edition: Jazz Big Band Arrangement

Description: Swing - Advanced

Publisher: Walrus Music Publishing

It’s been a hundred years since the iconic jazz recordings that Brent Wallarab's Gennett Suite invokes began to be made for the record-label subsidiary of a Richmond, Indiana piano factory. Recorded jazz itself is only a few years older, marking the sources that Wallarab brilliantly reflects in his new work as early bursts of light in the newly-formed universe that was 1920s jazz—a music so vibrant and modern that author F. Scott Fitzgerald latched onto it for a description of the decade itself as 'the Jazz Age.'

It's an apt term, actually. The 1920s was an age of sound, with many Americans increasingly able to listen to phonograph records and radio broadcasts, to call one another on a telephone, and to hear actors and actresses talking in movies. Its technologically inspired transformation of connectivity had an impact comparable to that of social media and digital communication in our own era. Jazz, spreading rhythm around the land from New Orleans and Chicago to New York and California, was a beneficiary and became the soundtrack of the times.

As jazz moves into its second recorded century, new technology has given listeners an embarrassment of riches, thanks to streaming services and other forms of transmission that continue to evolve. How do jazz artists respond to so much accumulated history and influence, requiring you only to pick up your phone and browse everything from early masters such as Jelly Roll Morton and Mary Lou Williams to modern-day luminaries like Esperanza Spalding and Vijay Iyer?

Brent Wallarab's The Gennett Suite is a response to the call of jazz history rooted in the composer’s love of the music, his desire to transform and renew it, and his own history. Wallarab arrived in Bloomington, Indiana in 1987 to pursue a graduate degree in jazz studies at Indiana University, and specifically to study with jazz educator David Baker, whose reputation as a brilliant teacher and composer was already widespread. After completing his work at IU in 1991, he moved to Washington, D.C. and began a job at the Smithsonian Institution, transcribing and restoring hundreds of big-band charts that the Smithsonian had deemed historically important. Several years later, with colleague Dominic Spera taking a sabbatical, Baker called Wallarab back to Bloomington to take on a teaching role himself. (Now a tenured member of IU's jazz faculty, Wallarab has inherited Baker’s former office at the Jacobs School of Music and is the inaugural recipient of a professorship established in Baker’s name.) Shortly after his return Wallarab also co-founded the Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, which at nearly 30 years and counting is one of the longest-running big bands on the modern scene, with a discography of eight albums that includes two tributes to the music of David Baker, and now The Gennett Suite. The Gennett Suite, Wallarab emphasizes, is not a recreation of the classic 1920s Gennett recordings made by artists such as Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke. Wallarab instead has used these landmark Gennett solos and compositions as seeds, creating a thriving new landscape of music right at home in the contemporary world, but well-marked with signposts pointing to the origins of our present moment.

Movement 3: Hoagland
It's only fitting that the suite now moves from Bix Beiderbecke to Hoagy Carmichael. The two young men and future jazz legends became friends in the early 1920s when Bix was barely out of his teens, but quickly making a name for himself among the many burgeoning jazz scenes of the Midwest, especially on college campuses. Hoagy, three years older and deeper into his professionally uncertain twenties, told the story later that Beiderbecke encouraged him to try writing music one morning while the two nursed hangovers and listened to Stravinsky’s Firebird at Carmichael’s Indiana University frat house. Carmichael, whose admiration for Beiderbecke’s transcendental touch on the cornet inspired rapturous remembrances in his eventual memoirs, had already made some stabs at composing, and one of them—Freewheeling, subsequently retitled Riverboat Shuffle—was recorded by Bix and his Wolverines group at Gennett in the spring of 1924. It was only the second record for Beiderbecke and the band, and the first time Carmichael ever had a song put to wax.

The third-movement title Hoagland refers to Hoagy’s formal first name, but we are indeed in Hoagland, a musical Midwest of the mind spawned in Bloomington, Indiana that gave us hundreds of songs including Moon Country, Skylark, and Star Dust, which has garnered enough versions over the years to all but function as the national anthem of American popular song. Written by Carmichael in the mid-1920s (and Hoagy himself the same age as the still-young century), it was recorded for the first time by a Carmichael-led small group at Gennett on October 31, 1927. Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer were in the area, traveling with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, but they didn’t make the date. (Carmichael would connect with them shortly for an important recording of another song of his, Washboard Blues.) Nevertheless Bix’s influence on Carmichael was felt, with the composer tapping into the cornetist’s yearning lyricism and emulating the structure of his phrases.

"Star Dust is one of the most romantic and profound American songs ever written," Wallarab says. As much as the standard has been recorded, he feels that it still has much to offer in a creative jazz setting. He chose an unconventional &frac34; meter and also drew inspiration from hearing his wife, pianist Amy Wallarab, perform classical pieces by Chopin, Debussy and Federico Moupou at their home while his work was in progress. His version opens with saxophonist Greg Ward’s statement of the melody in dialogue with pianist Luke Gillespie (who peppers his playing with dissonant dashes that Wallarab wrote in the spirit of Mompou) and a wash of cymbals behind them, and by the time the rest of the orchestra begins to come in at the 1:35 mark, we are already deep in reverie. Wallarab’s gorgeously restrained arrangement and Ward’s beautifully-phrased saxophone solo bring the song’s poignancy, its bittersweet sense of time and the enormity of the past, into the 21st century. The lustrous night air of Star Dust is also served well by the subtle power of Gillespie's pianistic undercurrent and punctuations. (Around the four-minute mark he begins pinging notes like signals from a lost satellite in space.) Ward’s saxophone continues to swirl around the burgeoning ensemble as the chart swells and then recedes, hanging on one final note from Gillespie. <[> There'll be more about this recording of Star Dust later, because something magical happened at the session. In the meantime, drummer Sean Dobbins powers the band into Carmichael’s Riverboat Shuffle, beginning the second part of the Hoagland movement. Riverboat Shuffle is done in two parts, featuring trumpeter John Raymond in the first and saxophonist Todd Williams in the second. The fade-out/fade-in between the two parts is a nod to early extended jazz recordings of Duke Ellington such as Creole Rhapsody and Reminiscing In Tempo, released on 78 rpm records that had to be turned over to continue the composition’s performance. "These moments are part of the compositional aesthetic to me," says Wallarab, "and even though they were not what Duke had in mind, they have a charm and a sense of anticipation. I love those moments and wanted to emulate them." Raymond’s joyful trumpet solo is full of bravura and Williams once again lends his tenor heft to the vibrantly-shifting tapestry that Wallarab weaves behind him.

What breadth this work has! "The movements are meant to complement each other, the first and third covering more emotional range and the second and fourth providing fun, playful contrast," says Wallarab. He's done that and more, playing on the changes of the early jazz canon and producing a musical travelogue that reflects his own odyssey as a composer as well as the flowering of the music from its Gennett-era roots.

--David Brent Johnson

David Brent Johnson is the jazz director for WFIU-Bloomington, Indiana, and the host of the nationally-syndicated historical jazz program Night Lights.

 

 

Full Score
2 Alto Saxophones (Alto Sax 1 Doubles Soprano Sax, Alto Sax 2 Doubles Flute)
2 Tenor Saxophones (Tenor Sax 1 Doubles Flute)
Baritone Saxophone (Doubles Flute)
4 Trumpets (All Double Flugelhorn)
3 Trombones
Bass Trombone
Piano
Bass
Drum Set

Trumpet 1: E6 (Optional F#6)
Trombone 1: Bb4