Portraits and Places

Big band jazz composers may be the most pure artists in all of music. These people do what they do strictly out of love. When you're done paying the band - if in fact there IS anything to pay the band with- there is absolutely no money in writing original big band jazz. Even the universally respected Maria Schneider survives on Chamber Music America grants. So it would be a little misleading to say that the last time this blog caught a show by the Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra, it was in late summer 2014 at a now-defunct Park Slope coffee emporium/wifi hotspot. The mighty ensemble might have played a couple of gigs since then. But what a fantastic show this one turned out to be! Considering how much of an individualist the bandleader is - his axe is the alto flugelhorn, sort of a higher-pitched valve trombone - it was no surprise to hear how distinctive his music for large ensemble is, a stormy, brassy blend of old and new, with a nod to the great Miles Davis/Gil Evans records of the late 50s and early 60s.

That Brooklyn show - at the old Tea Lounge, which for quite awhile was booked by a similarly estimable big band composer, JC Sanford - opened with deliciously bustling noir 50s crime jazz riffage and quickly hit a latin-infused swing fueled by an indomitable baritone sax solo, the brass punching in like a heavyweight with his nemesis on the ropes. A steady, apprehensively fiery trumpet solo handed off to sparsely dancing bass and eerily modal piano until the band rose again. It was like being at a Gil Evans show half a century ago, albeit surrounded by North Slope kids absorbed in their laptops and tablets.

Reeves kept the latin flavor going through the vampy second number, a brassy blaze finally interrupted by a wryly garrulous bari sax break, the composer taking a judiciously enigmatic, uneasily bubbling solo as the rhythm section crashed and burned. Catchy call-and-response between high reeds and brass dominated the trickily syncopated number after that, lit up by a tantalizingly moody alto sax solo.

A brooding midtempo clave number was next, Reeves soloing resolutely and steadily as the rest of the brass shivered, up to a neat if similarly uneasy round-robin brass chart, The band sank their collective teeth into a blustery early space-age Ellingtonian shuffle after that, And the trumpet solo on the eerily triplet-infused number that followed, wow. If memory serves right, the band also made their way through an Ellington tune late in the set (when you're multitasking and letting your recorder do the heavy lifting, details like this grow exponentially elusive over time).

Oh yeah - one more thing - Reeves loves false endings as much as he loves noir latin grooves. There's nothing more fun than getting the crowd to believe that every single one of the eighteen or so people onstage is finished, when in fact they're not. At this late date, it's impossible to remember who was in the band - Sanford might have been on trombone, maybe Ben Kono - a fortuitously ubiquitous presence in big band circles in this city these days - on alto sax, possibly Carl Maraghi on bari sax and Nadje Noordhuis on trumpet, among the group assembled back behind the couches along the space's northern wall. What's coolest about the Smalls gig is that whoever's on piano gets to play the house upright rather than the electric piano the band was forced to make do with in Park Slope.