Live at Butler University

Kenton concerts are never just musical events; they’re something special. Monuments to a man and an idea that have endured. Every age has the good fortune to produce artists who work against the grain. Where there is disorganized noise, they create harmony and melody. Where there is ugliness, cruelty and an apathetic acquiescence to both, they create art forms of remarkable beauty and feeling.

Stan Kenton is such a man. He moves through our musical lives with the grace of total assurance, defying fashion, defying the inexorable erosion of fantasies, defying age itself. Just turned sixty, he remains in command of his worth, determined not to become an anachronism in a musical time he helped to create.

With the energy born of confidence, Kenton is a highly original artist whose dignity and inventiveness have raised jazz to the level of a timeless art. Kenton plays the piano but the orchestra is his real instrument and he has treated it in the manner of a playwright with a versatile stock company, always pushing to extend his reach.

He uses music both as a vehicle to explore new concepts and as an instrument of provocation. The flash, the flair, the sensuous thrust of the Kenton orchestra have not only survived but conquered three decades of changing tastes to become classic. The multiple brass climaxes, the swirl of tonal colors overlaid on haunting harmonic patterns, the carefully paced ensemble statements glimpsed off charts that read like pages torn from a Dostoyevsky novel, combine into a kind of deep-mouthed empathy—not so much a remembrance of sounds past as a revelation of jazz’s future.

It was Kenton who first moved American music beyond its “polka dots and moonbeams” phase into a meaningful rapport with the changing fluorescent environment of the Forties. His first band which played at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California in 1941, found its early inspiration from the Jimmy Lunceford style, but his music quickly matured in three directions: the polytonal inventions of Bartok and Stravinsky; the Afro-Cuban rhythms translated for big band by Johnny Richards; and the intricate harmonies of the great French modernist Darius Milhaud, adapted by Pete Rugolo. London’s Sadlers’ Wells company has experimentally choreographed some Kenton arrangements and several French and Italian art films have been built around his music. Much of the thematic psuedo-jazz that now serves as background music for avant-garde films and television series can be traced directly to Kenton’s influence.

The fundamental intent of jazz is to entertain and recharge the spirit with new sensory awareness. No music depends so much on the individual musician and his ability to improvise. Ideally, the jazz performer is a spontaneous, non-repetitive poet expressing himself through his instrument. But what Kenton asks of his musicians is that they carry the spirit of his composers’ ideas over into their own musical ruminations.

By broadening the harmonic, rhythmic and structural boundaries of jazz composition he has evolved a new dimension of collective improvisation. “Each time we play,” Kenton says, “I like it to be a new experience, even though it may be a piece we’ve performed time and time again. It must be a balance of complete freedom and discipline. I want our music to express the widest range of emotion…from the most intimate, delicate form of communication to a roaring, intense, organized expression of human energy.”

The orchestra heard on this album is a young road band, airy and free, nineteen kindred spirits proving to us and to themselves that in big band jazz, the whole is very much greater than the sum of its parts. You can hear the pride in their music, sense their awe for the leader, and support their optimism that today’s rock will gradually evolve into their kind of music, because that’s the only direction in which it can grow.

Stan Kenton has been on the road for 31 years now and nearly every evening the band sounds as if it had come all the way only to fulfill this particular one-night stand. This is Stan Kenton’s pride as he plies his craft with dignity and conviction. “To be able to play the kind of music I believe in,” he says; “without having to make it conform to some utilitarian situation is freedom. This may sound strange to others who hate the road, but that road means freedom to me.”

Kenton recorded this album last summer, while playing a jazz clinic at Butler University in Indianapolis, one of a hundred similar performances he gives every year at U.S. and Canadian high schools and universities. It is important as a reaffirmation of the Kenton magic and as a revelation of the impressive composing talents of Ken Hanna, Hank Levy and Willie Maiden.

side one

Lonely Windrose: After a brief introductory statement by Kenton on piano, Quin Davis’ flute brings in the full band. The brooding beauty of the melody gradually takes over as saxophones cascade behind the chant of Ray Brown’s flugelhorn. Ken Hanna’s melody (its title taken from the “windrose” chart readings of the prevailing winds around Tahiti) speaks of nights at sea, thick with summer, unknown birds that cry in the wind and insects-of-a-day suffocating in the starlight. The voyage of the Windrose ends in safe harbor with some dulcet sighs on Davis’ flute.

Fringe Benefit: John Worster’s walking bass kicks off the first of Hank Levy’s contributions. Quin Davis’ alto begins to weave some intricate patterns above the brass figures as the band relaxes into a straight-ahead mood. Each of the orchestra’s sections fans in and out with a kind of inexorable succession of salutes to the proposition that with enough talent and commitment jazz composition can produce an ensemble sound that really swings. Here Levy is returning to his roots in the sort of music he played when he briefly succeeded Bob Gioga in the Kenton band’s baritone chair during the mid-Fifties.

Samba Siete: In a hypnotic series of variations, each an evolution of the last, Hank Levy has turned the samba into a musical celebration with all the joy and expectancy of a primitive rain dance. Here is an anthem in 7/4 time to a mysterious deity exploding, like a Mexican flag, into every color of the rainbow. Broad, open voicing and staccato phrasing which characterize the Kenton sound give the Samba its airy, majestic impact. The rhythm (beautifully laid down by Jerry McKenzie and Ramon Lopez) becomes as important as the melody, with the band roaring toward a climax sure to bring on the deluge.

side two

Indra: By using time signature changes based on the goading, mystical punctuations of far eastern, especially Indian music, Hank Levy’s scores have added an element of tension to this and many of the other new charts in the Kenton library. The unusual time signatures reflect themselves in a sense of dramatic imbalance that keeps musicians and listeners constantly on the edge of about-to-be-fulfilled expectations. Indra’s complicated 9/4 rhythm also provides a show-case for the band’s five trombone players. There is something strangely invulnerable about Kenton’s trombone sections. In other orchestras, trombone players seem satisfied to do their little ooh-wah’s, then sit down again. But in Kenton bands the trombones have always provided the lyrical anchor of the sound that engulfs its listeners with the same feel ing of decompression that comes after a scuba dive. Indra begins and ends with a trombone chorus saluting the night. In between Chuck Carter, that master woodwinds engineer, contributes a snake-charmer’s soprano saxophone solo and Ray Brown glides in and out with a pastoral sounding flugelhorn. But it is Dick Shearer’s authoritative, tasteful solos which leads the trombone section from a whisper to a howl and then, though primed for a demonic climax, toward a mournfully lyrical ending.

Theme for Autumn: Long, peppermint afternoons of walks and silences. The serried stillness of trees giving off a russet glow-all latent color waiting for the momentary arrival of dun winter. That’s the kind of romantic vision Ken Hanna brings to this musical lament for lost seasons and lost loves. Kenton’s piano captures the mood, elaborated on by Dick Shearer’s trombone and Ray Brown’s flugelhorn. The piece evolves into a tone poem with a compassionate, grieving quality maintained throughout its passages of pure azure-like melody. A mournful, whispered counterpoint .between Kenton’s piano and Phil Herring’s tuba closes off these brooding reflections.

Boilermaker: Reminiscent in its intensity to an old-time southern camp meeting, where exhortation takes the place of logical discourse, this is jazz, pure and simple. Willie Maiden allows the band to soar in full-throated, sinewy harmony. Here is the brass section, blowing as if it were suspended ten feet above the rest of the band; there’s the lyricism of the saxophones pulling from underneath, modulating the mood. And as always, the stone-truth rhythm section, pushing and lifting the band with complex syncopations that set up a living environment for the Kenton sound.

side three

St. James Infirmary: This is how the starboard lookout on the Titanic must have felt. Something incredible is about to happen. Stan Kenton sings, while the band plays Woody Herman’s Blue Flame. What else is there to say?

The Height of Ecstasy: Pillows of sound, loose clusters of chords and blurred strings of notes produce an orgiastic setting for this composition of Willie Maiden’s. Here is a one phrase tune with incredible variations, arousing sensuous feelings by unravelling an insistent thread that can only gain one release. Trombone glissandos act as a bridge between translucent curtains of melody that soar to a bolero-like climax.

Blues Between & Betwixt: This important chart by Hank Levy extends the blues into alternating 7/4 and 7/8 time. Jerry McKenzie’s inspired drum work propels the band along its predetermined flight plan while Richard Torres blows a macho salute to the blues. Levy’s continuing experimentation with time signatures (he also writes for the Don Ellis Orchestra and his own band at Towson State College in Baltimore) has extended the pioneering ventures of the late Johnny Richards, whose magnificent Concerto for Orchestra (recorded by Kenton as Adventures in Time) first used these rare time combinations.

side four

Fragment of a Portrait: Love sweeps down like a hawk from the sky; mauve nights sob with leftover songs. This is the grieving, introspective quality evoked by Ken Hanna’s unashamed lyricism in this emotionally draining lament. Like voices shouting into the wind, the alto (Quin Davis), trombone (Dick Shearer), piano (Stan Kenton) and flugelhorn (Ray Brown) solos engulf the listener with a sense of shared loneliness—which is exactly what Stan Kenton’s music is all about.

Tenderly: Mike Wallace’s bass trombone combines with the Kenton piano to revive this standard in the form of an unlikely duet. Wallace achieves an almost biblical cadence in his playing (like some gruff ship’s captain reading from the Good Book during a burial at sea) by dropping each phrase a tone at a time and finally taking us with him to the very bottom.

Beeline East: This is the Kenton road band at its best-pulsating, swinging, communicating. A near-symphonic fusion of jazz and Latin rhythms is used by Ken Hanna to create the background for a unison chorus that establishes the texture of the melody. The eloquent hailstorm of sound gradually gives way to a sparse, trampoline-like tension against which the soloists (mainly Quin Davis on alto, Ray Brown on flugelhorn, and Dick Shearer on trombone) test their instruments. This cut demonstrates an important aspect both of Hanna’s craft and Kenton’s perception. No matter how complicated or sophisticated an arrangement becomes, it never loses its sense of jazz as hot, existential, get-it-off music.

Artistry in Rhythm: Hearing the band’s theme again, you can imagine Kenton at a half-crouch on his piano bench, playing the keyboard as if he were proselyting it. He gives a downbeat, the long slender fingers of his hand cutting the air like dinner knives. There’s a sinus-clearing blast from the ten-man brass section and he turns them off with a twist of his elbow. He smiles, slouches over the piano, watching his men, leading them home, projecting once more the effortless truth: that this is not just a big band, not just jazz, but eternal music with the great inner authority of a work of art.

PETER C. NEWMAN
(Mr. Newman is editor of Maclean’s Magazine in Canada.)