Bakery Devotes Mondays to the Big Band Era

The Jazz Bakery kicked off a new series Monday night with the appearance of the Tom Kubis Big Band. Although it’s going to take a month or so before it happens on a weekly basis, the programming plan is to establish Monday nights at the Bakery as a regular venue for big band jazz performances.

It’s never quite been clear why Los Angeles clubs have not followed the pattern--common in New York City at such rooms as the Village Vanguard--of devoting Mondays, usually a quiet night when musicians are available, to big band performances. It’s true that the size of the ensembles doesn’t precisely make for big paychecks (to say the least), but most musicians love the opportunity to play in large ensemble settings and to indulge in relaxed interchanges with audiences.

The Kubis performance was a good example. It’s no mystery that the unifying element in programs of this nature is the music itself, with the lineup of players shifting from appearance to appearance. Kubis, an ebullient, humorous front man and a first-rate arranger-composer, made frequent reference to this fact, at one point calling up a piece featuring trombonists Alex Iles and Alan Kaplan and explaining that it was written for two other trombonists and that Iles and Kaplan were sight-reading the music.

The upside of that equation is that there are so many gifted musicians in the Southland that it is generally not difficult to assemble a skillful group of players. And, as it turned out, Iles and Kaplan played the rapid-fire, bop-styled piece with considerable adroitness. Among the other high points: trumpeter George Graham’s lovely rendering of “My Funny Valentine,” Rich Bullock’s whimsical, low-note bass trombone romp through “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and trumpeter Jeff Bunnell’s soloing on “A Certain Smile” and a Kubis original, “A Pretty Thing.”

Appropriately, the set was topped off with a guest appearance by trumpeter-singer-bandleader-humorist Jack Sheldon, who uses many of Kubis’ arrangements in his own band. Sheldon is never less than entertaining, and he was in characteristically bawdy humor with his between-songs patter. But there was no joking about the brisk, rhythmic effectiveness of his singing and trumpet playing on “The Sheik of Araby,” “Route 66” and “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week.”

* Big Band Mondays continue at the Jazz Bakery on March 12, when the Tom Kubis Big Band returns, and March 19 with the Isaac Smith Big Band. Admission $17. 3233 Helms Ave., Los Angeles. (310) 271-9039.