Jazz educator Glenn Cashman is, of course, also a composer/arranger as well as a saxophonist, and he spent his post-tenure sabbatical from Colgate University, where he is Associate Professor of Music, writing new tunes, arranging (Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Aguas de Marco"), and adapting some of his previous compositions ("Lighthouse Keeping Man," "The Circuit") for this, his first album with the 15-piece Southland Big Band he leads in Southern California. Cashman's academic credentials are confirmed in his music, which is littered with stylistic touchstones in the field of post-swing big-band jazz from Stan Kenton (evoked most clearly in the closing track, "A Samba for You," which is pegged as an homage to Hank Levy, who wrote for Kenton and mentored Cashman) to third stream (notably in the tone-row-based "Satellite Twelve," another credited homage, this time to "new music" composer Robert Gibson, with whom Cashman did his doctoral work at the University of Maryland). But such footnotes should not be off-putting to the potential listener. Rest assured that, whatever the antecedents of Cashman's writing, he has put together a swinging band here and given it room to play. Even his pal Luther Hughes, with whom he plays tenor in Hughes' Cannonball-Coltrane Project, gets a lively showcase in "Concerto per Basso Pavimento." So, Glenn Cashman & the Southland Big Band earn the exclamation mark that appears at the end of their name in the album title, and, their academic qualifications notwithstanding, present a lively, and sometimes even hot, set.
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