SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra:  Wynton Marsalis, trumpet and artistic director. Rose Theater, New York, 20.10.2007 and 26.10.2007 (HS)

Though the role of a jazz composer and arranger may take a different tack from that of his counterpart in the classical world, the ones who excel at their art can produce music of equal complexity and spark emotions vividly. In concerts this past week, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its leader, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, played music by two 20th century jazz composers and arrangers who deserve greater renown, not least because of musical inventiveness and finesse that parallel in their own ways the work of their classical brethren.

On a visit to New York I made a beeline for Rose Theater in the lavish Time Warner Center five blocks from Lincoln Center. It was built in 2004 as the permanent home for this jazz band. Fifteen of New York's best jazz musicians play music of the past and commissions new pieces, just like a modern symphony orchestra might. In the hands of these technically brilliant and passionate players, music that may only be heard on old LPs comes to life.

The first of the two concerts I heard was a tribute to Benny Carter, who was being inducted posthumously into the orchestra's Hall of Fame. Carter's work spanned the arc of jazz from before the dawn of the swing era in the 1930s until his death in 2003. He wrote for a series of his own bands, then for the likes of Count Basie, and for films such as "An American in Paris" and "Stormy Weather." Some of his own tunes are jazz classics, including "When Lights Are Low" and the novelty song, "Cow Cow Boogie."

The other concert explored the music of Gil Evans, who added instruments nontraditional for jazz to his arrangements as early as the 1940s, using French horns, bassoons, oboes and a tuba. His writing was more complex than Carter's. Evans is most famous for his work with trumpeter Miles Davis. In the late 1950s and 1960s they recorded several classic albums in the jazz idiom, including "Birth of the Cool" and "Sketches of Spain."

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra plays with tight intensity and real swing. They relish dynamic changes and shifts in tone, bringing the music to life with technical mastery the original bands could seldom muster. The musical arguments in these arrangements emerge in their hands (and lips) with high-def clarity. Marsalis, one of the few jazz musicians who has achieved success in the classical world, delivered several hauntingly beautiful and musically taut solo improvisations in the concerts I heard.

A jazz arrangement often comes out as something more than the original music that inspired it, in essence a new composition. When Carter got his hands on "All of Me," a song standard by Seymour Simons, it became an interplay of complex, sometimes contrapuntal writing for the five-saxophone line, interspersed with passages for the trombones and trumpets playing together or "talking to each other" as separate sections.

Writing for jazz means incorporating extended improvisations for soloists. Carter was a more traditional jazzman and wrote in a straightforward idiom that alternated ensemble writing with solos. Evans, who counted the avant-garde composers Harry Partch and John Cage among his friends, liked to weave the solos and ensembles together into more subtle forms.

One of the highlights of JALCO's Evans concert was Kurt Weill's "Bilbao Song" (from the 1929 score to "Happy End"). Evans arranged it for a jazz orchestra for the 1959 "Out of the Cool" recording. He starts with a rattling, medium-tempo jazz beat on drums and maracas, the the bass, guitar and piano vamping along. The tune, slowed to a crawl, plays against it, the instrumentation and tone changing with each note (perhaps inspired by Webern's instrumentation of the Bach Ricercata a 6?). Finally, Marsalis' solo trumpet enters, at first playing the tune more or less as Weill wrote it, then expanding it into ever more complex improvisations. Meanwhile, the band growls along in counterpoint.

Two arrangements from Evans' collaboration with Davis on Gershwin's score to "Porgy & Bess" featured Marsalis on "Gone," and another member of the trumpet section, Ryan Kisor, on "Gone, Gone, Gone," which Evans developed from "My Man's Gone Now" and the trio "Bess Is Gone." Rodgers and Hart's "Nobody's Heart" (from "Jumbo") melted into swirls of color in Evans' delicate arrangement, which featured an oboe solo.

Although Evans was associated with the quieter, more cerebral "West Coast Jazz" school, he could also write straightforward, hard-swinging arrangements. "Sister Sadie," a gospel-tinged piece by the Hard Bop pianist and composer Horace Silver, ended the first half of the concert with a series of joy-inducing extended solos and swinging, rock solid ensemble playing to Evans' impeccably dressed music.

Adding to the richness of the music,  between pieces Marsalis talked about what the composer/arranger had been aiming for. He showed the same sort of insight communicative conductors, such as Leonard Slatkin and Michael Tilson Thomas, bring to symphony concerts. There are more parallels between jazz and classical music than most of us realize.

Harvey Steiman