I will be writing occasionally about big-band jazz and how it came to mean a lot to me, but this is just a recommendation to brighten your day. I became a devoted fan of The Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra during the pandemic - they posted whole shows up on YouTube to keep us entertained during those two dismal years, and I watched so much that I came to regard each individual musician as lockdown pals.. The Fifties:A Prism, the album from which this is taken, consists of contemporary compositions that use that amazing jazz decade as an inspiration, and it’s really worth hearing. One young man, the trombonist Christopher Crenshaw (born 1982, on the left in the YouTube still below), is responsible for every single piece.
But it was ‘Cha Cha Toda la Noche’ that I had on repeat. I don’t know why that chattering cha-cha beat is so inherently cheering, funny, even. Perhaps it’s because it makes us want to dance, yet anyone of my age or younger doesn’t have a clue how to do it, and in our heads we are laughing at ourselves for even thinking of trying. I imagine myself looking like Groucho Marx. But what gets me every time is Victor Gaines’ clarinet solo, which seems as if it is being delivered to him directly from a jazz angel. It’s a masterpiece of timing, melody and invention; it swoops and soars, even the little contributions he makes during the preceding trombone solo are gorgeous, and hint at the magic to come. I can hum every note now. I hope you end up being able to do the same.
During my time at Sony Jazz we worked closely with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, who were never less than wonderful. They always looked sharp too, the ironing boards backstage were made full use of before a performance!
Here in Toronto, if you're ever up this way, we have a 13-piece band called The Orange Devils — and they play original charts (sometimes slightly rearranged) by Ellington, Basie, Fletcher Henderson and many others. Those charts, from the late '30s through to the mid-'40s, are in the Smithsonian in Washington and are now in the public domain. The guys in the band are all veterans in their forties and fifties — when a friend of mine, a young woman of 23, subbed in when one of the trombonists couldn't make it, she told me she was very nervous. "I'll have no problem reading the charts, but I just dropped out of music school and three of my professors are in the bend.". Not much video on them, but this piece from the COVID era may cheer you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sJ4vdOWY14