Marsalis explores big band sound with his Lincoln Center jazz vets

The big jazz and swing bands were the symphony orchestras of American music in the 20th century. Yes, Gershwin, Copland, Barber etc. continued to write for the classical orchestra, but it was the big bands, with their instrumentation of trumpets, trombones, saxophones and rhythm, that served as both the stimuli and the vehicles for an extraordinary collection of uniquely American sounds.

Wynton Marsalis is well aware of that fact, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, under his direction, has consistently explored the rich repertoire of material reaching from Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington through Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and beyond. On Monday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Marsalis and the LCJO displayed some of the most entertaining pieces in that repertoire in a program titled “Out Here to Swing.”

And swing it did. The personnel of the LCJO has been remarkably stable, evident in the group’s easygoing musical interaction and virtuosic soloing. Fast ensemble passages -- many filled with tricky, multi-note sections -- were delivered with a crisp, driving sense of swing. Improvisations often surfaced as dialogues between two or more players tossing musical ideas back and forth, knowing intuitively what to expect from each other within a purely impromptu creative arena.

Marsalis spiced the big-band selections with lighter elements -- guest star spots for singer Dianne Reeves and trombonist Dick Nash (whose son, saxophonist Ted Nash, is an LCJO regular), a few small ensemble pieces (including “Mack the Knife”) and his own vocabulary of wildly eccentric trumpet sounds.

But the high points of the evening were those in which the playing, the soloing and the music came together in purely symbiotic fashion -- most notably in such appealing numbers as Billy Strayhorn’s gorgeously textured arrangement of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Henderson’s swing-style take on Ravel’s “Bolero.” A pair of extremely unusual Ornette Coleman selections -- “Lonely Women” and “Una Muy Bonita” -- further displayed the powers of the big band as a continuingly productive medium for jazz exploration.