Throughout his career Winton Marsalis has kept alive the legacies of the big-bands jazz eras. As musical director-conductor of Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, he puts his signature on classics and rarities from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie. In LCO performances he joins his trumpets on the bandstand and weighs in with his distinctive sound for a new generation of jazz fans.
Marsalis’s 2009 ‘Blues Symphony’ is a fusion of blues and jazz idioms and is captured In all of its swinging luster in a new release by Pentatone of a performance of the work by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, recorded at Detroit’s Orchestra Hal in 2023, led by DSO’s musical director/conductor Jader Bignamini.
.” In the CDs liner notes Bignamini writes the piece gives the musicians “room to express themselves…with so many different solo parts for each instrument and section, people will hear a very special sound- the DSO sound.” Marsalis adds” symphonic orchestra can and will swing, play the blues, feature melodic improvisation, and execute the more virtuosic aspects of jazz and American vernacular music with absolute authenticity.”
‘Born in Hope’ is the Suite’s first of seven movements and opens with the brassy processionals of NOLA street band that blooms to a Gershwin-esque skywriting percussive crescendos a captivating reeds bursting out with what Ellington would call stating the theme.
A for the prelude to ‘Swimming in Sorrow’ symphonic jazz Soundgarden with simmering horns that give way to a meditative pastoral and fades in with rowdy trombone herald and silky clarinet solos, then one smoldering muted trumpet expressing bittersweet sound of an outlier wailing in the distance as the full orchestra chimes in with vintage big-band grandeur.
‘Reconstruction Rag’ unfolds with sharp edge harmonics that glide to an unfussy, straightforward homage to Scott Joplin era ragtime, sounding brassy and witty all along a sound garden path and even as it gets a little feral in the middle, with some dueling (percussive) counterpoint, smoldering horn effects and feral woodwinds all cruising to a glittering big-band finish. Joplin would be tapping his foot with approval.
That infectious energy sets-up’ Southwestern Shakedown’ with the lead violin essaying a blues swing, framed with pulsing poly- rhythmic orchestral tempos, tremulous reeds and swirling decrescendos simmering to the surface.
‘Big City Breaks’ could be playing under the credits of a 50s movie about rebels with a jazz cause. Marsalis unleashes a burnished fuselage of brass and percussion, scabrous muted horns and the occasional cop whistle. Then the ‘Danzon y Mambo, Choro y Samba’ opens with a violin ballade then breaks into a tango glissade and a lusty flute samba, the mariachi horns filling in the soundscape to a fulsome orchestral danza.
The vigor, interpretive artistry and orchestral luster by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on Marsalis’ Blue Suite ends with the dense allegro ‘Dialogue in Democracy’ that joyously gallops to its own heart pumping finish. This recording is a reminder to symphony orchestras that jazz works deserve to be programed more in American concert halls.
