With every passing year percussionist John Hollenbeck has upped his game as a composer and arranger, writing increasingly ambitious material for his two primary groups: the chamber-music-like Claudia Quintet and the richly orchestrated Large Ensemble. He’s a devoted student of jazz’s big-band tradition, cleaving unapologetically to ambitious composers and arrangers such as his longtime mentor Bob Brookmeyer. Earlier this year his Large Ensemble dropped its strongest album yet, All Can Work (New Amsterdam), which resonates more for me with every listen—it rarely connects directly with conventional big-band jazz, focusing instead of vibrant harmony, intricate moving parts, and bursts of sonic color. It’s a dense and varied piece of work, dazzling its detail and harmonic richness, and rather than incorporating a thematic thread or organizing principle, it relies for its cohesion on the strength of the pieces and how they’re sequenced.
“Elf,” which you can hear below, is Hollenbeck’s radical arrangement of the classic Billy Strayhorn ballad “Isfahan,” famously included on Duke Ellington’s 1967 masterpiece The Far East Suite. The core theme is buried in this adaptation, emerging in full only about four minutes into the six-minute piece. “Elf” was commissioned by the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2015 for a program celebrating Strayhorn, and at the fest, local saxophonist John Wojciechowski played its tricky opening statement, which is written in a dizzyingly high register; Tony Malaby gamely tackles the part here. The ensemble is definitely the star on All Can Work, but it includes a slew of great improvisers, including Malaby and fellow reedists Jeremy Viner, Dan Willis, and Anna Webber, trombonist Jacob Garchik, pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Chris Tordini, and trumpeters Dave Ballou and Matt Holman.All Can Work by John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble Today’s playlist:
