What could possibly be subversive about a toe-tapping, hard-swinging big band jazz album offering a fond nod back to the golden age sounds of the 50s? If you’re in New York, that kind of music is against the law now – if you’re playing it for an audience, anyway. Who ever knew that we’d be in the iron grip of a pseudo-medical Taliban at this point in our history. There is an election coming up this fall, folks – you do the math.
Since the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra can’t play live right now, they’re doing the next best thing, releasing high-quality archival concert recordings at a furious pace. Their 2017 performance of Duke Ellington’s Black Brown and Beige was as lush and symphonic as anybody could possibly want. The next one in the series, trumpeter Christopher Crenshaw’s The Fifties: A Prism – streaming at Spotify – is a completely different animal.
This is one for the diehards and party people who love this group for their brassiness, and sophistication, and purism – and also because you can dance to this record. Crenshaw has been a driving force in the band for a long time; this 2017 concert is the debut recording of his six-part suite, which comes across as a homage to bandleaders from Dizzy Gillespie to Gil Evans. It’s idiomatic, yet it’s not predictable.
The opening number, Flipped His Lid is a straight-up, briskly strolling postbop swing burner, high voltage alto sax building to where the tenor takes the music in a more suave direction, handing off to scampering piano and a break where the rhythm section drops out completely – but the brass section doesn’t let that stop them!
The genial Just A-Sliding is a trombone feature, a jump blues with deep springs on the low end and a droll drum break. With its divergent, conversational voicings, Conglomerate is a look back at how dixieland went further north and got a little more serious. Crenshaw’s subsets of the orchestra chatting each other up over the bass and drums are a cool touch.
The wide-angle, tremoloing muted work of the brass and a guilelessly cheery clarinet solo give Cha-Cha Toda la Noche a suspiciously satirical feel; the overt Gillespie band homage at the end is spot-on.
Likewise, Crenshaw nails the lustrous, top-to-bottom Gil Evans voicings of Unorthodox Sketches, the requisite ballad here, clarinet going in completely the opposite direction this time. True to form, the group wind up the record with the epic Pursuit of the New Thing, a mashup of Ellingtonian gravitas, latin flair and Mardi Gras revelry with a bright alto solo and finally a dynamically rich one from the composer.