Captain Black Big Band (Posi-Tone)
Captain Black Big Band
Released April 2011
Top 10 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll 2011
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mh0nXD64TF_eibHRnWH9RWwHhfZmXtwks
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/7mKUt69k6bdgCAUhQ9K0k1?si=M5ry_jVOQBul0sbzSp-Y-g
About:
Captain Black: A new superhero? Yes and no.
“Captain Black was a tobacco my father smoked,” pianist Orrin Evans says. “A good friend of mine, drummer Nasheet Waits, his father [drummer Freddie Waits] smoked Captain Black. One day, we were somewhere, and I could smell the tobacco. We just ended up talking about Captain Black. The name stuck. It’s really just a tribute to my dad.”
Making a 21st-century jazz big band operational is a fool’s errand. Evans maintains a grassroots approach. He keeps a healthy list of accomplices at the ready; some are key members of his professional family, while others just want an opportunity to play.
Seventeen musicians came to WBGO, and that’s less than half of the rotating cast of the Captain Black Big Band. Orrin Evans stands in the conductor position more than he sits at the piano bench.
“I’m the facilitator,” Evans says. “Basically, between my wife and I, we’re trying to get the gigs. I’m the organizer, putting it all together.”
“It’s a great band that can go in any direction at any time,” says saxophonist Todd Bashore, the band’s lead alto player and principal arranger. “It has that small-group mentality within the big band.
“Writing for this band has to keep a certain kind of vibe,” Bashore says. “I have piles of charts that just won’t work for this band. I try to make it so everybody’s part is enjoyable to play. That’s something that arranger Billy Strayhorn did. When he brought a chart in, he didn’t ask if you liked the chart. He asked, ‘Do you like your part?’ “
There are plenty of moving parts in this session for The Checkout. Evans, Bashore and trombonist Stafford Hunter each take a solo in “Captain Black.” Trumpeter Duane Eubanks and baritone saxophonist Mark Allen are the soloists for “Easy Now.” Fabio Morgera is the trumpeter featured in the jazz standard “Stardust.” The full band arranges the last tune, “Jena 6,” while tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm screams over them.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Josh Jackson (npr)
Track Listing:
1. Art of War (Ralph Peterson9 04:56
soloist:
Rob Landham
2. Here’s the Captain (Gianluca Renzi) 09:04
soloists:
Victor North, Orrin Evans
3. Inheritance (Todd Marcus) 07:12
soloists:
Todd Marcus, Walter White, Anwar Marshall
4. Big Jimmy (Orrin Evans) 06:58
soloists:
Walter White, Ralph Bowen, Anwar Marshall
5. Captain Black (Orrin Evans) 10:02
soloists:
Jim Holton, Ralph Bowen, Stafford Hunter
6. Easy Now (Orrin Evans) 11:37
soloists:
Tatum Greenblat, Mark Allen
7. Jena (Orrin Evans) 10:02
soloists: Neal Podgurski, Jaleel Shaw
Personnel:
Piano: Orrin Evans, Jim Holton, Neil Podgurski
Bass: Mike Boone (1), Luques Curtis, Mark Przybylowski (3)
Drums: Donald Edwards (7), Gene Jackson (2, 6), Anwar Marshall
Saxophones: Mark Allen, Chelsea Baratz, Todd Bashore, Ralph Bowen, Wade Dean, Doug DeHays, Wayne Escoffery, Tia Fuller, Rob Landham, Victor North, Jaleel Shaw, Tim Warfield, Darryl Yokley
Trumpets: Luke Brandon, Daud EL-Bakara, Josh Evans, Tatum Greenblatt, Leon Jordan Jr., Brian Kilpatrick, Curtis Taylor, Tim Thompson, Jack Walraith, Walter White
Trombones: Stafford Hunter, Frank Lacy, Joe McDonough, Ernest Stuart, Brent White
Bass Clarinets: Mark Allen, Todd Marcus
Recorded February 19, 2010, at Chris’ Jazz Cafe, Philadelphia, PA, by Michael Comstock; April 2, 2010, at
The Jazz Gallery, NYC, by Glenn Forrest; and April 3, 2010, at The Jazz Gallery, NYC, by Glenn Forrest
Produced by Marc Free
Mixed and Mastered by Nick O’Toole at Studio 507, Los Angeles, CA
Additional Engineering/Editing by Mike Boone and Dave Stoller
Photography by Howard Pitkow
Review:
There’s a certain type of payoff only a big band, or large jazz ensemble, can provide. It’s akin to driving a muscle car that doubles as a paint store: So much momentum and horsepower, so many colors and textures. Driving that car requires an investment, too; you try to marshal 15-20 top-flight musicians, artistically or economically. But plenty are still willing to make a go of it, in search of the oomph and oooh only an extended family of horns can provide.
It makes sense that the pianist Orrin Evans is one of them. He’s been on the circuit since the mid-’90s, and leading bands for nearly that long. (He’s got a new small group record coming this summer.) He knows both the Philadelphia and New York jazz scenes well, and has often sought to bring them closer. And as a performer, he brings a bold intensity to the piano, seemingly informed by McCoy Tyner’s voicings and a heavyweight boxer’s roundhouse punches.
The jazz orchestra that Orrin Evans created is called the Captain Black Big Band, though it’s almost the Captain Black Big Bands, plural. A lot of musicians — young and old, from either Philadelphia or New York — played on this debut album: 38 in total, over seven tracks. They rotated in and out during this series of live performances from early 2010; Evans even got two other pianists to take turns in his own chair. Indeed, there’s a collective spirit to the enterprise, where Evans is more community organizer than meticulous auteur. He wrote but four of seven tunes, only one of which he arranged for big band, while bandmates wrote and arranged the other numbers.
This town hall meeting of a band makes the kind of jazz that nearly everyone could agree to call jazz. There are layers of squirming saxes, bright piano and serious brass blasts — low-end, high-note, and mid-range alike — tied together with a surplus of swing. But it doesn’t sound stuck in a misremembered era — there are jutting edges to the writing, and they’re played with a fashionably loose vibe. (As analogues, think of contemporary big bands led by trumpeters Roy Hargrove, or Nicholas Payton, or Charles Tolliver, or even the Charles Mingus repertory group, which Evans has served in.) And no soloist is afraid to hold anything back: There’s audacity of spirit here.
Here’s an example from the album’s last song, the brooding, weighty “Jena 6,” recorded in front of a New York City audience in April: Jaleel Shaw starts his solo meandering about on alto saxophone; six tumultuous minutes later, he’s absolutely screeching an overblown solo cadenza. After all the rough-and-tumble, the unapologetic swing, the energy spent trying to ride such an unruly beast of a band, it hits like a deep tissue massage, aching and cathartic. And when he finally lifts the horn from his mouth, the audience audibly understands.
Patrick Jarenwattananon (npr)
