JAZZ REVIEWS : NEW AMERICAN HAS A LOT OF NEWS

There have been some changes in the life of the New American Orchestra. It has a new home (the Wadsworth Theater), a new size (down from the original 86 to 60 members) and a new, attractive admission price (free).

Sunday evening, in the first of three concerts scheduled for the Wadsworth, Jack Elliott conducted the orchestra in three works. The first and least of these was the premiere of Allen Vizzutti’s “Gift of the Sun,” which began in a haze of New Age music before fanning out into a skillfully written but emotionally sterile variation of the movie-music genre with which, despite its intermittent jazz associations, this ensemble has often been linked.

Michael Barone’s “Theme and Variations” showed more melodic imagination. Barone used the string section for some oddly intriguing intervallic motions in the first movement. There were traces of jazz (an invisible and not very audible Bill Perkins on saxophone) in the second movement, and, as the work progressed, a better defined rhythmic impetus.

The evening came alive with a reprise of Manny Albam’s “Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra,” written for Bud Shank. This attempt to weave a jazz soloist into the body of a complex orchestral work is one of the more attractive ventures of its kind, and was enhanced by the continued growth of Shank. After three decades as a major name in jazz he seems to be reaching new creative peaks.

Albam’s piece starts as a jazz waltz, later framing Shank in several settings, among them a splendid duo passage with the virtuoso bassist John Patitucci. A Latin sequence worked well, as did Shank’s biting attack during the long a cappella conclusion.

Supersax, led by Med Flory, played the opening set, going through its long, familiar and always contagious Bird-dogging motions on Charlie Parker material. For two tunes, the group was joined by the New American Orchestra’s strings. They sounded merely spliced on in “April in Paris,” but were put to intelligent use in Roger Kellaway’s arrangement of the concluding “All the Things You Are.” This put the Vizzutti work in an unenviable spot; the vitality, swing and communicative zest of Supersax represented all the things “Gift of the Sun” wasn’t.