The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra 6/21/05

by Alan Greenblatt

The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra on Sunday played that lovely arrangement for harmonizing saxophones by Ralph Burns, "Early Autumn." Then they planed a pretty hot, drum-banging, trumpets wailing version of Dizzy Gillespie's Latin jazz standby, "Manteca." They followed that up with a pretty version of the fairly obscure "Any Dude'll Do," featuring a solo by alto sax player Marty Nau, otherwise wasted on this night, that showed all the abstract quick runs of the bebop players that helped to kill off the big band music this band was featuring.

That's not quite true, I suppose. The big bands faced bigger threats once World War II, such as television and a dispersing urban population. This concert was devoted, in fact, to music mostly recorded after the war was over, when big band music became punchier, as opposed to swinging, but never regained its great popularity during the 1930s.

The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, which is an 18-piece band, hasn't been playing much here in DC in recent years. Their concerts, reviving the works of particular bandleaders or arrangers, used to be staples of the spring jazz season. They've devoted more time to touring, leaving just a few of the local members to present small-band tributes here in town.

Now apparently they have a new arrangement with the Smithsonian Associates to play concerts here that will cost money to get into, instead of their old free fare. That's not entirely a bad thing. It used to be impossible to get tickets, but you could have walked up to the door on Sunday and gotten in.

The concert was at the Natural History Museum's Baird Auditorium, which is hardly an acoustic wonder but was a great setting for this band. The hall is wide but not deep. You're at most about 20 rows from the stage. That meant you could feel the full effect of this brassy band. It entered your head like listening through powerful headphones.

The concert borrowed from a mix of bands' books -- Woody Herman and Oliver Nelson and Benny Carter and Basie and more -- the performances following closely the written arrangements as documented in studio recordings. There was still some space for the soloists to stretch out, as we say, with some hot trumpet solos from Lenny Foy and sax work from Rob Dixon. Russell Wilson's piano playing was sly, although it was hard to hear him over the band during the first half and his effects were marred by overmiking after intermission.

It's a rare treat in Washington to go to a jazz concert with an intermission. The prime concert venue, the Kennedy Center, presents two jazz sets with separate admissions, meaning you're lucky to hear 70 minutes' worth. The SJMO played long enough you were sort of sorry that they took an encore.