With the new year comes new beginnings. As I write this, I’m deep in the throes of preparations for two milestones: my debut as the new Composer in Residence for the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, and my debut conducting the Metropole Orkest.
These projects each involve a trove of arrangements — charts I have spent the past year and change writing — featuring two of my favorite musicians on the planet: Warren Wolf and Cécile McLorin Salvant.
Hot of the presses, the scores for the Warren Wolf project include four of Wolf’s own compositions, plus four more celebrating his vibraphone lineage.
Of the WW originals, “Gang Gang” is a 12/8 burner that Warren has recorded with Christian McBride’s Inside Straight. “Sunrise,” from Wolfgang, begins in the misty morning twilight before meeting the day with a cross-stick groove. “A Walk in Central Park, After Midnight” and “Enter the Chambers” — dedicated to Mr. Dennis Chambers – are both featured in Warren’s famous multi-tracked YouTube videos, wherein he plays all of the instruments. (An aside to the drummers: the inset videos of Warren playing drums aren’t reversed — he really does play a left-handed kit.)
I also arranged two pieces recorded by Warren on his most recent release, The History of the Vibraphone: Lionel Hampton’s best-known, best-loved composition, “Midnight Sun” — co-written with Sonny Burke, who also arranged the original version for Hamp’s big band — and an infectious original by Dave Samuels (of Spyro Gyra fame), “Spring High.”
Warren also made a couple of fantastic suggestions of material to arrange. The first is the overture from Chick Corea’s Lyric Suite, which he wrote to feature himself and his longtime collaborator Gary Burton, supported by a monstrously tight string quartet (Ikhwan Bae, Carol Shive, Karen Dreyfus, and Fred Sherry) — this is absolutely one of the best jazz-meets-classical recordings I’ve encountered, and certainly some of Corea’s most meticulous and inventive writing.
The second is John Lewis’s four-part reinvention of his own composition, “Two Bass Hit.” Of course, I knew the original — written in 1946, this was the first chart Lewis brought into the Dizzy Gillespie big band, and it got him instantly hired as an arranger, and, eventually, as a pianist. Diz’s rhythm section later broke off to become the Modern Jazz Quartet, and in 1955, Lewis transformed “Two Bass Hit” into a four-part suite he rechristened “La Ronde,” essentially turning it into a mini-concerto for each member of the Modern Jazz Quartet in turn: himself on piano, Percy Heath on bass, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, and Kenny Clarke on drums.
My approach to arranging this suite for big band involves a bit of a mash-up. Using Lewis’s four contrasting versions as a framework, I interleave them with quotes from music by Quincy Jones (Lewis’s successor as an arranger for Dizzy), Duke Ellington, Bob Brookmeyer, and Thad Jones. These also happen to be some of my own biggest influences, and I had a lot of fun interpolating their vocabulary into Lewis’s suite. I hope it comes across as intended: a sincere love letter to the history of big band arranging.
Warren is well-known to serious jazz fans through his longstanding association with Christian McBride, the SFJazz All Stars, and his own albums as a leader. He’s unquestionably one of the greatest living vibes players, and a phenomenal all-round musician. I wrote all of the mallet parts in Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Ogresse with Warren in mind, and now it’s my great pleasure to now feature him alongside the Frankfurt Radio Big Band in my maiden voyage as Composer in Residence.
For those of you unable to join us in person: the January 24 concert will be live-streamed on the Frankfurt Radio Big Band’s YouTube channel.
When Cécile McLorin Salvant entrusted me with these ten songs, her “desert island ballads,” to arrange for her and symphony orchestra, I was thrilled — in no small part because I absolutely adore hearing Cécile sing them. (I don’t know if anyone has ever done “Barbara Song” better than Cécile.)
As an arranger, tackling well-known tunes like “Sophisticated Lady” and “Send in the Clowns” is obviously a challenge — particularly if your goal is to serve the song, and not go off on some kind of arranger’s ego trip, where you’re trying so hard to impress everyone with how inventive you are that you obscure what makes the song great in the first place. Cécile’s impeccably curated desert island playlist also gave me the opportunity to dive into little-known gems like Buddy Johnson’s “Ever Since the One I Love’s Been Gone” and Cy Coleman and David Zippel’s “With Every Breath I Take,” from City of Angels. While working on these charts, I tried to be mindful of the Jeff -Goldblum-in-Jurassic-Park admonition: “you were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”
Cécile had a very clear vision for this project. One of her most important touchstones was the string of albums Sinatra recorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s with arranger Gordon Jenkins, particularly Where Are You? and No One Cares. Much less well-known today than the recordings with Nelson Riddle, Jenkins’s writing elicits a genuine emotional rawness from Sinatra, one that isn’t really heard elsewhere in his body of work. I immersed myself in those records, making a close study of Jenkins’s mastery of mood and heightened emotion, before eventually finding my own way into all of these songs.
Last April, in Paris, I was in the audience as Cécile performed these arrangements for the first time — a rare chance for me to sit back and bask in the sound, while the wonderful French conductor Bastien Stil did all the hard work. But next month, it’s my turn to take the podium, leading the sensational Metropole Orkest for the first time. We’ll be taking this program to some of the top concert halls in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam’s storied Concertgebow.
If you can’t join us in the Netherlands, these arrangements will also be getting their US premiere on March 27 at Carnegie Hall, where Cécile will be joined by the multivalent American indie-orchestra The Knights, conducted by Eric Jacobsen. There is also a recording in the works — I’ll have more news to share on that front in the weeks to come.
GRAND VIBES: WARREN WOLF, DARCY JAMES ARGUE, FRANKFURT RADIO BIG BAND
Jan. 23: DARMSTADT – Centralstation
Jan. 24: FRANKFURT – hr-Sendesaal
CÉCILE McLORIN SALVANT, DARCY JAMES ARGUE, METROPOLE ORKEST
Feb. 3: GRONINGEN – SPOT
Feb. 4: UTRECHT – TivoliVredenburg
Feb. 5: – AMSTERDAM – Het Concertgebouw
Feb. 7: EINDHOVEN – Muziekgebouw
CÉCILE McLORIN SALVANT & THE KNIGHTS
Orchestral arrangements by DARCY JAMES ARGUE
Mar. 27: NYC – Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium