From 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday at All Souls Unitarian Universalist There-Is-No-Heaven-Suckers Church, I got my first taste of the People's Liberation Big Band, and, oh, what a blessed dollop of hot, salty jazz-rock-latin-chamber music it was, folks.
As you can see from this flier, the program was called WENKYHYNK, which sounds like "chimichangavich" when you say it in Russian and means -- yes! The Nutrcracker Suite by Piotor Ilyich Tchaikovsky!
Conducted by maestro Brad Cox, who also does some of the arranging, the People's Lib is a musical collective dedicated to new music. Though the group could most easily be filed under jazz, it does way more than just swing. Latin, world, classical, rock and experimental noise are also in the group's bag of tricks. This past Sunday, the group performed its own version of the Christmas staple. It was adapted from the original score by various members of PLBB, all of whom are immensely talented and sharp local musicians who deserve your attention and support.
For me, about 10 percent of the music I heard on Sunday was recognizable as Tchaikovsky. This meant that I caught the major riffs from the score -- i.e., the seven or eight signature melodic riffs (Sugar Plum Fairiy dances, etc.) that are among the best-known tunes in Western music -- and the rest was either added anew or modified from the original suite so obtusely that I failed to pick up on it. In a sense, it played by the same rule improv-based jazz always has: you take a standard and riff on it. But because the PLBB works off mainly written material (from what I could gather), it was more of an exercise in compositional experimentation than in jamming. Though the arrangement did call for a default setting of "free jazz" whenever there was a battle or flurry of activity in the house in the first act, the PLBB avoided skronking through the Nutcracker like Sun Ra going Chernobyl on Tchaikovsky. And because it did rely on ingenuity of composition, the performance was interesting, fun and audience friendly.
I regret not tallying all the times the PLBB would drop a clever mass culture reference into the mix and elicit laughs from the crowd. The script that Cox and fellow experimenter Jeffrey Ruckman (the show's narrator and sometime pianist) put together, full of Bush-bashing political satire and understatement humor, got laughs, too. But it was mostly in the act of playing their instruments that the musicians on stage tickled the audience, and that takes talent.
The bravura section of the ("racially offensive," "based on hateful stereotypes") character dances was the show's highlight. A soprano sax and two trombones played the head of the Chinese Dance while all around them Afro-Latin percussion shook and clattered to an exotic beat. Next, the Spanish Dance loped into a straight Latin groove a la Tito Puente. In the Arabian Dance, the group got farther from the original suite, slapping a pork pie hat on the peacock with an almost gloomy, Mingus-evoking dirge.
On the next two numbers, the group spiked upward through, first, a kind of Pink Panther-esque (forgive my lack of culture), slinky noir sound on the Sugar-Plum Fairy Dance (lots of laughs that one got), and then to a crazy, early big-band-era arrangment for the Murlitons that clearly referenced "Sing, Sing, Sing" before careening into a crashing drum-and-bass-powered section that was practically heavy metal. The Liberation Band liberated itself of the earth altogether on the next tune, bassist Jeff Harshbarger's arrangement of the Pas de Deux. Using Michael Stover's pedal steel as its leading voice, the tune gave "Sleepwalk" by Santo & Johnny a Moody Blues-style, epic-rock-ballad overhaul. Tchaikovsky was in there somewhere, I'm sure. If not, he wasn't really missed.
So, you get the idea: lots of inspiration, lots of fun. And lots of hard work. In addition to maintaining its monthy gigs at the Record Bar alongside Harshbarger's Alternative Jazz series (see January 4), the PLBB is planning a major event in May of next year: a live soundtracking of the Russian silent film Battleship Potemkin at the Pistol Social Club. It's planned for May 1.
Don't miss it, comrades.
-- Jason Harper
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