Here comes McBride!

[Serial_Apologist]

SA

Sometimes I wonder just how much you like jazz!!

I am working from home and have the Christian McBride concert on as I work on my costs. It is quite interesting listening to this music performed live as the arrangements certainly come alive in a way that they don't on the two CD's. The studio records are intriguing because the music covers so many bases. The arrangements are not all in one idiom and the feel of the band owes a lot to Thad Jones / Mel Lewis in my opinion.


I love big bands and think that McBride's band is unashamedly mainstream. There are no boundaries being broken and, of you like, the band is content to work within pretty conservative parameters. However (and this is a big "however") this is what jazz is supposed to sound like. The scores allows plenty of room for soloists to express themselves within the context.

For me the kind of jazz I want demands the full attention, I have to say. And I don't see why anyone should lay down "what jazz is supposed to sound like".

If you want more innovative writing you should have checked out the Maria Schneider track on J-Z on Saturday albeit I think you probably would have not liked that either.

I did, as it happens; and I found the arrrangement to be very nice indeed, as is always the case with Ms Schneider. However, that track highlighted for me something that has always been as issue with big bands - namely that the arrangement is the main element driving the improvisation. In some instances (though obviously not this one!) it gets drowned out by it. This was one of the many issues Graham Collier attempted with varying degrees of success to address, in having his head arrangements interwoven in varied extrapolations into the improvising in such a way that the soloists can acknowledge thematics while at the same time informing the manner and spirit in which the pre-conceived elements can be infiltrated into the resulting discourse, so that no performance of the same piece is ever the same. The ways in which this can be done are manifold, as can be heard in recordings of Barry Guy's London Jazz Orchestra, Paul Rutherford's Iskrastra, Keith Tippett's Ark and in other groups in which he adopted an eclectic approach, acknowledging "the tradition" in conventional solos with orchestrated backings while incorporating cue-ins in the manners devised by Barry Guy or Graham Collier, the various large line-ups of Kenny Wheeler from "Song for Someone" onwards; and Alex Schippenbach's Globe Unity... and Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, back in the day. The problem with that particular Schneider track for me was the insipidity of the solos, though I'm not to know if that was typical of the rest of the album, and in any case I wouldn't go so far as to say I disliked it!