Jay Harvey Upstage

As occasionally facetious master of ceremonies, Rich Dole hinted at the risk of a Jazz Kitchen bandstand loaded with trombonists. But likely everyone felt clear of any danger, because massed trombones deftly deployed turn out to be delightful and unthreatening despite the dominance of brass. Mellowness takes precedence over blast. Foundational: Rich Dole (left) anchors his colleagues on bass trombone.  The occasion Tuesday night was the debut of a new ensemble, the Naptown Trombone Collective , shining throughout a host of good arrangements. Arrangements and originals by co-leaders Dole and Brian Pattison varied the parade of jazz standards and works by famous mentors and role models like David Baker and Slide Hampton.  Baker (1931-2016), the influential jazz educator and originally a trombonist who turned to jazz cello for most of his career, received the posthumous tribute of Dole's arrangement of his "Harlem Pipes" to start off the set. The five-trombonist front line ...

Matt McDonald: Harboring heady visions What do you get when you move the jazz trombone from its historically embedded supporting role to starring in several contexts? Maybe something like Matthew McDonald 's "The Long Wait" ( BJURecords ). Long waits seem to have been characteristic for many creative musicians after the COVID interruption of 2020-21. This New York trombonist's response is this CD. Its original material varies from bandleader plus rhythm section to the addition of other sidemen, who include an adaptable trumpeter, four woodwind players, and a string quartet. The patience required to adjust to canceled live appearances and retreat to the studio and the workshop, then invite the muse and solicit her indulgence, is channeled in the title track. It's an easy, medium-tempo swinger. Welcome to "The Long Wait."  The trombone is an instrument suited to the expression of patience, after all. Articulation is compromised by the need to make rapid, p...

Gray box at black box: Ben Asaykwee and Claire Wilcher Five years ago, in a country far away (it seems) from the present, just before COVID was on everybody's tongue and in the air they breathed, "White City Murder" debuted at the Phoenix Theatre , which is now finishing its 40th-season celebration in a performing-arts home with "Cultural Centre" formally added to the place's name. On Friday night, a season-crowning production of Ben Asaykwee's virtuoso musical fantasy on the legend of H.H. Holmes opened. It's focused on Holmes' nefarious activity around the 1893 Chicago world's fair, which itself was a virtuoso fantasy of scientific and purported social progress, embodied in its white architecture. The pseudonymous Holmes was a 19th-century serial murderer (a side effect of his specialty as a con man and swindler) who established scary residence near the site of the thronged Columbian Exposition (the fair's formal name). His complicated...

Years ago one of the alternative tabloids that flourished briefly here published an interview with the Osmo Vänskä has the vision and the vehicle. Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's new music director in which he delivered a dismissive assessment of Gustav Mahler's music.  I wish I'd saved it, because Raymond Leppard summed up the personal mood swings embedded in Mahler's works somewhat in this manner: "Oh, I'm glorious and blessed by God; Oh, I'm such a  sh*t!" My attempted paraphrase becomes an exact quote in the second phrase, as I was shocked that a symphony music director would express his disdain in such vulgar terms. But the Leppard dislike took hold, and I believe the only Mahler that Leppard programmed as music director (1987-2001) was the gentle, heaven-focused Symphony No. 4, which never visits the outhouse. Despite the permanent vogue Mahler now enjoys, there has long been a history of rejection, or at least resistance, among some professio...