Ed Neumeister's "Wake Up Call"

[Larry Kart]

Album of the year for me. Here's a modified version of an email I sent this morning to Neumeister:


I have yet to listen to all of it but wanted to relay some of my no doubt rather hyperbolic thoughts because my head is pretty much bursting with them. Just amazing music!
 

In particular, you’ve solved a problem (not that solving this or any other so-called problem was your goal)  that many listeners probably didn’t even know existed as such — namely that in a good deal of actually or would-be sophisticated contemporary writing for large jazz ensembles (big bands, if you will) there is, so it seems to me, often a disjunction between the actual or would-be sophistication/complexities (timbral, harmonic, formal, etc.) of the writing for the horns and the playing of/writing for the rhythm section The latter typically more or less has  a “swing” feel (i.e. sense of fairly steady punctuated forward propulsion, with occasional passages where the rhythm section is asked to interact more forthrightly with the rest of the ensemble) or the rhythm section works in a modified/scaled up version of the more oblique and liquid “prose-like”  time feel that probably came into the music with the Evans Trio at the Vanguard recordings. The problem IMO is that neither of those rhythm section time feels/approaches really  fits that well with what’s going on orchestrally, the result being that neither level of the music (orchestral work, rhythm section accompaniment/activity) seems to talk to/interact that much with the other. Thus one feels far too often (or at least I do) that the overall and often otherwise quite attractive results are finally rather inorganic — as though the rhythm section and the ensemble that has been assembled and been written for  with, again, a sophistication that approaches that of a high quality piece of modern “concert” music, exist in two different worlds, and their musical interaction, such as it is, almost verges on the arbitary. (Think, to pick one imaginary example, of what Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste would sound like if its rhythmic  activity did not pervade the entire orchestra but were instead a matter of the orchestra playing what it does and a rhythm section responding to it. Yes, with players of brilliance and a lot of luck, one might have something, but the piece was conceived organically and needs to be played as such.)

If you’re with me at all so far — I could cite examples of what I’ve been talking about above from a number of contemporay large-ensemble jazz recordings, but why bother? — you blow all that out of the water, both in terms of conception and execution. 

First, one might say that you write for the horns as though THEY were the rhythm section, and you do so not only, or often not even primarily, by upping the ante of overt rhythmic activity on their part. Rather, the strong sense of meaningful rhythmic activity in the ensemble (i.e the horns) seems to me to be largely the byproduct of an almost unprecedented fragmentation of timbres, sections, of the rapid and unexpected arrival and departure of specific ensemble passage work, and of the intervention of soloistic episodes that fly through what one assumes at the moment are or are going to be essentially ensemble textures, with these fluid soloistic interventions also twining around more upfront solo work by other more upfront horn soloists. (BTW, who is the trumpeterer [Dave Ballou?] who ducks in and out of Rich Perry’s solo on “New Groove”? And who, in the ensemble, is that terrific bass clarinetist? (It's Adam Kolker, I've learned.)

In any case, the resulting feel of an orchestra that is filling the entire musical space with lucid melodic-rhythmic-harmonic speech (albeit, again, much of this achieved by a fragmentation of timbres, sections. etc. so intense that it might be, but never is, bewildering) percolates quite naturally down to the alert actual rhythm section, which is then not given the role of mere accompaniment but is always in dialogue with, and/or an organic part of, the already rhythmically active orchestral fabric. BTW, speaking of execution, if your writing per writing were not as organic language-wise as I feel/hear it to be, I can’t imagine how any band, no matter how technically adept, could ever play this music. Talk about patting you head and rubbing your stomach at the time -- this is like making love to Marilyn Monroe on a unicycle while translating Marcel Proust.

 

Personnel:

Reeds: Mark Gross , Billy Drewes , Dick Oatts , Rich Perry, Adam Kolker
Trumpets: Tony Kadleck, Ron Tooley, Dave Ballou, Jon Owens
Trombones: Keith O’Quinn, Larry Farrell, Marshall Gilkes, David Taylor
Rhythm Section: David Berkman - piano, Hans Glawischnig - double bass, Steve Cardenas - guitar,
John Riley - drums, John Hollenbeck - percussion.

 

[Larry Kart]

A track from the album:
 

 

[jlhoots]

Works for me - ordered.