Two Great Groups and a Place to Play

Irony was in the air Wednesday night at the Hollywood Bowl with “Big Band Blast,” a program featuring two ensembles--the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band--that have lost significant performance platforms.

The Clayton-Hamilton aggregation, once the resident jazz ensemble at the Hollywood Bowl, ended its three-year franchise at the close of the 2001 season and was making its only Bowl appearance of 2002. The highly praised Carnegie Hall band, led by trumpeter Jon Faddis, was finishing its final season after having been dropped from the Carnegie roster earlier this year.

Yet despite the oddly similar circumstances surrounding their joint appearances, both groups played with spirit and enthusiasm. If they were concerned about their future playing opportunities--or, in fact, about their very continued existence as musical units--it didn’t show.

The Clayton-Hamilton orchestra, opening the evening, displayed the stylistic versatility that has always been one of its most valuable assets. Among the high points of the set: the saxophone section romping through Sonny Stitt’s “Eternal Triangle,” brimming with intensity in the ensemble passages, ripping off one solo after another by each of the section’s five members; co-leader and music director John Clayton’s touching bass solo on “Nature Boy”; and--best of all--a spunky, hard-driving Clayton original, “Shout Me Out,” featuring an extraordinary trombone battle between Ira Nepus and Isaac Smith.

The Carnegie Hall band followed with its own extraordinary effort. It relied far more on repertory material such as “Shiny Stockings,” “Giant Steps” and “Sing, Sing, Sing” than the Clayton-Hamilton group did. But in each case, what the Carnegie Hall band did with the familiar numbers was creatively transformative. Arrangements by gifted writers such as Slide Hampton, Frank Foster and Mike Abene grabbed the familiar themes and positioned them as brand new works.

The soloing by the Carnegie band’s impressive cadre of all-star musicians--especially Faddis, saxophonists Dick Oatts and Frank Wess, trombonist and conch shell player Steve Turre, and pianist Renee Rosnes--was expansive enough to add vital improvisational contrast, and the rhythm section cooked with the simmering intensity so characteristic of East Coast players. (It was very difficult to understand, by the way, how the Bowl program could manage to list hundreds of donors to the Philharmonic Assn. while failing to provide the names of the individual players in either of the jazz bands.)

Wrapping up the evening with a joint performance of three numbers, climaxing with all the players from both ensembles lined up across the front of the Bowl stage, “Big Band Blast” finished with a blend of excitement and poignancy--excitement over the marvelous musical stimulation provided by these superb groups; poignancy over the question of when we will see and hear them again.