Jazz Reviews : Holman Big Band a Study in Perfection

Hey, forget Alexander’s Ragtime, the band to come on and hear is Bill Holman’s. If it’s not the best band in the land, it shares that top spot with few others.

The hirsute, sweater-clad Holman led his dynamic 17-man crew through mostly familiar territory during the first and second sets Wednesday at the Biltmore Hotel’s Grand Avenue Bar--the new original “Sweet Spot” was the exception--but who cared?

His one-of-a-kind arrangements and orchestrations of Monk’s “I Mean You” and “Rhythm-a-Ning,” Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” and his “Front Runner,” “Petaluma Lou” and “The Real You” are such masterful examples of the big band writing--swinging like mad but often in delightful, less-than-obvious ways--that one could hear them over and over without tiring from the experience.

It helped that the musicians played this most challenging yet down-to-earth material with just-so proportions of precision and abandon, drawing extended applause from the enthusiastic crowd in the process. Featured soloists Bob Cooper, Lanny Morgan, Ray Herman and Bob Militello (saxes), Bob Summers and Tony Lujan (trumpets), and Rich Eames (piano) delivered the goods.

Highlights abounded. “The Real You,” announced by the leader as a piece describing “the part of you you never show to anybody else,” went back and forth from introspective, almost surrealistic passages to sturdy, straightforward stuff. “Yesterdays” gave Cooper sound cloud after sound cloud to wail over and “I Mean You” had a rock-’em, sock-’em shout chorus, as did many others.

An exhilarating ensemble like Holman’s needs a forum to air its wares and with the Grand Avenue changing policy and going with “soft jazz” at the end of the month, one hopes another jazz room picks up the cue.