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 4: Mr. Jelly Lord
Legendary man-about-early-jazz Jelly Roll Morton takes center stage in this final movement of The Gennett Suite. The pianist and composer's King Porter Stomp became a swing-era standard, with nearly every big band featuring an arrangement of it. Usually treated as an up-tempo “flag waver” (see Benny Goodman’s signature 1935 recording, with trumpeter Bunny Berigan unfurling some flags himself) as rousing band-book numbers used to be called, here it receives a mellow downshift, with a loping opening solo from Gillespie, an earthy and wry appearance from Rich Dole’s bass trombone, and contributions from trumpeter Jeff Conrad and soprano saxophonist Greg Ward as well. The mood is indeed playful as we approach the conclusion of The Gennett Suite.

Morton’s Grandpa's Spells provides the coda, launched by a merry round of trumpets and highlighted by Tom Walsh's perennially-hip saxophone and John Raymond's exclamatory trumpet as the band romps to the finish line. "There’s a quasi-Latin feel in the last section," says Wallarab. "You can't do Jelly Roll Morton without a little bit of what he called the 'Spanish tinge.'" To hear these familiar strains in a contemporary big-band context is one of The Gennett Suite's greatest pleasures. Just to further connect the dots on the colorful musical map that is The Gennett Suite, Bix Beiderbecke was present (but did not play) at the July 1923 Gennett date that brought together Jelly Roll Morton and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. In addition to its musical significance, that session was also one of the first to feature an interracial recording group. We can be grateful that such a configuration would eventually cease to be remarkable in a cultural context—and jazz is one of the reasons why.

A century on from Gennett's heyday, America is in many ways a very different country, and in some ways much the same. The Gennett record label and studio are long gone, but Hoagy Carmichael's Bloomington hometown plays host to one of the most prestigious music schools in the world at Indiana University. Here horns still sound in the night—train horns, saxophone horns, sounds at once familiar and new. Young musicians still strive to master their instruments and find their voices, with more history than ever before to learn, honor, and move on from. They migrate to the places and scenes that afford the best creative and professional opportunities. And jazz, through all of its evolutions and innovations and configurations, remains very much with us. This album is a paean not just to revolutionary musicians and composers and the Richmond, Indiana record label that documented them, but to the expansiveness and vision of an American art form. Think Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s Porgy And Bess. Think Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige. Think Maria Schneider's The Thompson Fields. These landmark extended works for large ensembles all differ from one another as much as The Gennett Suite differs from them, but they share a similar scale of ambition and accomplishment. And like them, The Gennett Suite, with all of its musical textures and nuances and soloist flair (Wallarab has been writing for some of these musicians for 30 years now—talk about Ellingtonian!), rewards repeated listening. There is much to savor here.

About those train horns still sounding...a moment of marvelous serendipity occurred during the session for Stardust, recorded like the rest of the suite at Primary Sound Studios, housed in a converted church built in 1924 that sits just east of Bloomington where the countryside now begins. "A train went by during a take and we had to stop until it passed," says Wallarab. All present agreed that the cosmos had just registered its approval of the project at hand, and a little bit of Gennett history was born anew a hundred years later on an August afternoon in Hoagland, as the celestial spirit of the 1920s answered the call of the 2020s across the wax-and-wane of time. We are reminded once again that what came before us matters, and that what matters most is what we make of it now. This music is testament to that, and to the enduring realm that is the great jazz state of Indiana. For such songs of praise we should all give thanks.

--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
Soprano Saxophone
Alto Saxophone
2 Tenor Saxophones
Baritone Saxophone
4 Trumpets (All Double Flugelhorn)
3 Trombones
Bass Trombone
Piano
Bass
Drum Set

Trumpet 1: G6
Trombone 1: B4