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 1: Royal Blue
The Gennett Suite opens with a low rumble of brass and cymbals and piano, as the curtain rises on a great musical drama about to unfold. The 1920s was an era of movement as well as sound, with the Great Migration underway as Black Americans moved north in search of economic opportunities and a somewhat less harsh racial climate. The young New Orleans trumpeter Louis Armstrong was among them, summoned by his mentor, King Oliver, to join Oliver’s band in Chicago. Their subsequent pairing produced some of jazz's first touchstone recordings (as expertly detailed in John Edward Hasse’s notes that accompany this set), including Chimes Blues, which bequeathed us Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo, and Dippermouth Blues, which yielded an Oliver performance that became one of jazz’s first widely transcribed solos.

So it's appropriate that Wallarab quotes the latter at the beginning of the suite, as trumpeters Jeff Conrad and Mark Buselli immediately establish the call and response motif that runs throughout the entire work—the early 21st century has engaged with the early 20th century. It also represents the mentor, King Oliver, calling to his disciple, Louis Armstrong, as well as the Great Migration in general. Trombones play suspended chords under the trumpets that mirror basic blues progressions while sounding contemporary, the first of many instances that inform The Gennett Suite with a past-present binary tension. Train-like horns behind Ned Boyd’s baritone sax signal the beginning of a journey, pulling out across a vast musical vista. (Trains loom large in the legend of Gennett's early recording days; railway noises from a spur next to the studio and a nearby line in the Whitewater Gorge sometimes spoiled takes under way. This note, too, will sound again in this essay.)

Wallarab proceeds to take the melodic aspects of Tin Roof Blues, recorded by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings for Gennett around the same time as Chimes Blues and Dippermouth Blues, through the paces, using its chromatic lick as a unifying device throughout the first movement. After Ned Boyd’s contemplative solo winds around a spare and languorous backdrop, pianist Luke Gillespie kickstarts the band and the torch is eventually passed to tenor saxophonist Tom Walsh, whose muscular lines help situate us in the more modernistic setting of Tin Roof Blues, Part 2. Trumpet fills from Mark Buselli and a brief return from Boyd set us up for Chimes Blues.

Honoring the melodic sources of the original Gennett recordings was a priority for Wallarab. "I didn’t want to deconstruct the music or hide its power," he says. "The only tune that is amended is Chimes Blues, where I focused on Louis's solo for the primary melodic content and only briefly hint at the actual melody of the tune. I wanted to show reverence, to present it almost as a love ballad, because how that's I feel about Louis Armstrong, and because Chimes Blues is the first time in history that we hear his voice. But then it evolves into a really hard-swinging slow blues, using the motif of Armstrong's solo to tie the whole arrangement together." Greg Ward's soprano sax solo helps thread the needle, while Mark Buselli raises the temperature to a simmer with his plunger trumpet contributions. The Chimes Blues part of the first movement is also punctuated with stings from the band reminiscent of Gil Evans, whose influence is felt strongly throughout The Gennett Suite, as is Duke Ellington's.

Dippermouth Blues serves as the springboard for the third and concluding part of Royal Blue, with Sean Dobbins’ New Orleans drum cadence bringing on trombones in a comping rhythm. A short duet figure for trumpet calls up Oliver and Armstrong’s original opening duet for the tune, and Andrew Danforth testifies on trombone. Todd Williams’ swaggering tenor sax solo leads the band into a brashly-confident and percolating outro, with the saxophone section playing a harmonized rendition of Oliver's solo, which inspires the chorus that follows as well, building to a dramatic crescendo that ends with Luke Gillespie's piano figure telegraphing what's to come—Bix Beiderbecke's Davenport Blues.

--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 (Trumpet 2-4 Double Flugelhorn)
3 Trombones
Bass Trombone
Piano
Bass
Drum Set

Trumpet 1: G6
Trombone 1: Eb5