KLON Fest Ends With Works Showing Range of Big Bands

“Blowin’ Up a Storm,” jazz radio station KLON’s four-day celebration of big-band music, came to an appropriate climax Sunday night at the Sheraton Long Beach Hotel with programs of music from Gil Evans and the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band.

“Appropriate” because the music represented the two broad primary approaches to big-band scoring. Evans was a Romanticist, deeply intrigued with the use of the textures and colors of jazz as dramatic expression.

Mulligan, on the other hand, had a more Classical bent, shaping his music with an emphasis on structure, rhythm and connectiveness. And, although many of the charts for his band were provided by Bill Holman, Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn, Johnny Mandel and others, they clearly reflected Mulligan’s point of view.

Most of the Evans music was drawn from his lush orchestral collaborations with Miles Davis--”Miles Ahead,” “Porgy and Bess” and “Sketches of Spain”--with the Davis trumpet passages performed by an all-star lineup of Conte Candoli, Johnny Coles, Carl Saunders, Ron Stout, Bob Summers, Steve Huffsteter, Bobby Shew and tenor saxophonist Billy Harper.

The results were, at best, uneven. The Evans charts are complex and difficult to play; more rehearsal obviously was needed. One suspects that the trumpeters, despite occasional successes, especially by Shew and Saunders, no doubt now have an enhanced respect for Davis’ not always properly regarded skills as a technician as well as a soloist.

Even more to the point, the Evans arrangements were conceived, harmonically and timbrally, for the sound and the style of the Davis trumpet, a detail to which most of the soloists gave only passing consideration. And, in the case of Harper’s hyper-emotional rendering of “Saeta,” all association with the piece’s original intention was lost.

The Mulligan segment, featuring such smoothly accessible items as Holman’s arrangements of “I’m Gonna Go Fishin’ ” and “Apple Core” and Mandel’s “I Want to Live,” came off better, in part because the music was considerably less idiosyncratic. It was fascinating, in fact, to note that the generic style of the Mulligan band continues to affect many of the contemporary large ensembles, few of which ever attempt to explore the thorny areas of the Evans musical path.

Earlier in the day, the Holman Orchestra presented the premiere of his Mulligan tribute, “The Missing Man.” There also were performances by a West Coast version of the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band, the Gerald Wilson Orchestra, a tribute to the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and an arrangers’ program.

As with last year’s KLON West Coast jazz concerts, performers and audience were predominantly white, male and middle-age. And, despite the presentation of such relative minutiae as the music of Boyd Raeburn and Claude Thornhill, there was virtually no acknowledgment of the significant effect of Latin and Afro-Cuban music upon the big bands of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Admirable (and successful) as the festival may have been on its own terms, KLON needs to move beyond a narrowcasting production approach that unnecessarily limits both the programming and the choice of players.