The orchestration skills of
Don Sebesky are known far and wide through jazz and non-jazz circles. As an arranger he has no peer, but tackling the music of
Duke Ellington in this centennial year of
Ellington's birth is a daunting task.
Sebesky proves up to the challenge, turning a few of
Ellington's tempos 180 degrees, lavishly building on well-established melodies, adding some flourishes of his own, and composing an
Ellingtonian suite as a 100th birthday present.
Sebesky assembled a 23-piece band with such prominent soloists as bassist
Ron Carter, trombonist
Bob Brookmeyer, saxophonist
Phil Woods and trumpeter
Tom Harrell. They further fortify
Ellington's heightened emotional aesthetic and vegetable-soup-like delicious music. Never taking a safe path,
Sebesky pumps up the midnight slow ballad "Mood Indigo" into a mid-tempo swing waltz,
John Pizzarelli's guitar so what backtalking with the horns. A loping bass from
Carter turns into a cowboy "Creole Love Call" with able solos from
Woods and
Harrell. The classic ballad "Chelsea Bridge" and "Take the Coltrane" are both fairly up swingers, the former with cleverly staggered phrases in the melody contrasting with the shouting horns, the latter where
Sebesky uses upper register horns to state the basic, simple theme that was
Coltrane's sound on this tune originally done by
Trane and
Duke. "Caravan" and "Satin Doll" are more typical rhythmically,
Sebesky dropping orchestral layer upon layer on the camel's back for "Caravan," while the face of "Doll" is shadowed in thick rouge by
Carter's bass way up in the mix, his lines running contrary to the band playing this well-known melody, lipstick traces provided by
Woods, mascara dripping via
Pizzarelli's coyish scatting and guitar licks. "Warm Valley" is as expansive a ballad as you'd expect from
Sebesky; it's an organ of sheer beauty. The nineteen-plus-minute "Joyful Noise Suite" runs thorough a quoted and paraphrased melánge of
Ellington catch phrases, starting with a bah-bah-doo-bop theme, merging into slinky, spooky gossamer crescendos and decrescendos, ending in a wild, hard-charging frenzy, the passages named "Gladly-Sadly-Madly." The band swings out on a euphonium led "Koko." Of all the tributes to
Ellington, this is the best, a magnum opus to the maestro from a man and his band who are well aware of his grandeur, plus how to play all the right notes. Highly recommended. ~ Michael G. Nastos