A tradition on a weekend saturated in tradition: Steve Allee Big Band at the Jazz Kitchen

It was no April Fools' joke but a harbinger of long-term survival in a tough business when the Steve Allee Big Band inaugurated the Jazz Kitchen on April 1, 1994.

Steve Allee taking care of business at the keyboard.

The ensemble headed by the master bandleader and father of proprietor David Allee has made an annual tradition out of lighting the birthday candles at the now-venerable jazz club with hot music.

On Saturday night, the Jazz Kitchen's properly focused observance of Jazz Appreciation Month continued with the highly anticipated return of the senior Allee's 17-piece ensemble. Catching the second set, I was moved by the concise attention to history, with shoutouts to significant contributors, shared from the bandstand in remarks by Steve Allee and club manager Frank Steans.

Allee has long acknowledged his forebears on the Indianapolis music scene in his compositions. Both people and places are worth commemorating musically, he has long felt. Thus the set opened with "Hubbub," a tribute to an Indiana Avenue nightspot of the same name from that artery's heyday as an entertainment attraction in the black community.

The hallowed masters of that scene got props as well when the band launched into Russell Webster's "Four Hours of Dreams," a ballad with heft, and later with Allee's arrangement of Claude Sifferlen's "Zebra 3," a rare original by the sui generis teacher of Allee and many others of local repute. The rendition was loaded with the harmonic adventurousness typical of Sifferlen's piano playing.

Allee applied the nostalgic touch lightly, and there was never any doubt that music would take priority. He let the music explain itself, so there was nothing to get in the way of savoring the kind of swinging chorale he set up, with  the rising lines of "Pure Spirit." If it was not conceived with the Easter spirit in mind, it might well have been: The sax section rolled the stone away with muscular adroitness. Chip McNeill's tenor-sax solo had flamboyance from the outset. Before he was done, the afterburners had kicked in. On baritone sax, Ned Boyd generated the same sort  of heat with his steady-burning solo on "Zebra 3."

It would be hard and almost beside the point to call attention to all the good solos. The main thing was how they fit into the context of Allee's busy, pungent arrangements. In intricacy, power, and coherence, the Steve Allee Big Band is the local — and still active — counterpart to the fabled Thad Jones-Mel Lewis ensemble that long held down Monday nights at New York's Village Vanguard.

Sure, there were signs this group could benefit from a more regular performance schedule, but so many of the members have academic schedules to meet hither and yon — there were several jocular references in member introductions as to who merited "Doctor" before his name.

Everyone's credentials seemed self-evident, however, right through the set finale, titled "Uncle Bernie" after an Allee kinsman who lived outside New Orleans and gave young Steve some crucial exposure to the foundational music scene there. It opened with zesty parade-ground patterns from Steve Houghton's drums, then set off on its jaunty course, including a witty alto solo by Dr. Matt Pivec of Butler University.  Academic jazz at its best has long since acquired street smarts. And post-graduate seminars for the public have been in the curriculum at the Jazz Kitchen for 28 years now.

[Photo by Mark Sheldon]