A Con­cert of Jazz, Jazz-Inspired, and Impro­vi­sa­tional Music

Jazz trum­peter Armando Corea started his son, nick­named “Chick,” down a musi­cal path early in life. He taught his son the basics of music, started him on piano, and allowed him to sit in on his gigs at a young age. This devel­oped in Chick an affin­ity for per­form­ing, and he began get­ting his own gigs in high school. He made two attempts at higher edu­ca­tion – once at Colum­bia, the other at Jul­liard – but his love of per­form­ing led him to aban­don each of these after only a few months. In the late 1960s, Corea played as a side­man for a num­ber of estab­lished groups, includ­ing those of Mongo San­ta­maria, Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughn, and Miles Davis. Corea first recorded some of his own com­po­si­tions with trum­peter Blue Mitchell’s group in 1964, and made his first record­ing as a leader in 1966. Since that time, Corea has estab­lished a num­ber of groups, includ­ing Cir­cle, Return to For­ever, the Elek­tric Band, the Akous­tic Band, and Ori­gin. These groups have var­i­ously been devoted to free jazz, fusion, and a range of acoustic styles.

Chick Corea’s Trio for Flute, Bas­soon, and Piano first appeared on Hubert Laws’s 1968 album Laws’ Cause with Laws on flute, Karl Porter on bas­soon, and Corea on piano. The same record­ing was released in 1973 on Inner Space, a col­lec­tion of all of Corea’s record­ings to that date on the Atlantic label. Corea writes that “[t]his trio was my first attempt to write a kind of cham­ber music. At that time, I thought that ‘cham­ber music’ was just writ­ten music played acousti­cally but with no drums. It has since become one of my favorite forms of music. Hubert’s great flute play­ing really inspired this piece.”

Paul Chi­hara, a native of Seat­tle, earned a doc­tor­ate in com­po­si­tion from Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity in 1965. In addi­tion to his time there with Robert Palmer, he stud­ied with Nadia Boulanger and Gun­ther Schuller. Chi­hara has received numer­ous awards, includ­ing Ful­bright and Guggen­heim fel­low­ships and the Lili Boulanger Memo­r­ial Award, as well as com­mis­sions from major orches­tras in the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. He has served as composer-in-residence at the Marl­boro Music Fes­ti­val, the Los Ange­les Cham­ber Orches­tra, and the San Fran­cisco Bal­let. Chi­hara is also active as a com­poser of scores for film and tele­vi­sion. He cur­rently serves as pro­fes­sor of the­ory and com­po­si­tion at UCLA.

Branches, writ­ten in 1968, is one of a num­ber of Chihara’s works that bear arbo­real titles, includ­ing Logs for dou­ble bass (1966), Drift­wood for string quar­tet (1968), Wil­low Wil­low for flute, tuba, and per­cus­sion (1968), and Red­wood for viola and per­cus­sion (1971). Branches con­tains three move­ments, sep­a­rated only by mea­sured silences. The first of these is brief and unmea­sured, con­sist­ing only of a line passed between the two bas­soons, an addi­tive event involv­ing all three play­ers, and mea­sured pauses. Move­ment two is entirely palin­dromic. The music builds to a rhyth­mic, tex­tural, and dynamic cli­max, then reverses itself exactly. In the third move­ment, Chi­hara makes use of a vari­ety of aleatoric ele­ments. These range from sim­ple indi­ca­tions to play “Very freely” in respect to rhythm to var­i­ous types of graph­i­cal nota­tion and sec­tions of free impro­vi­sa­tion. Chi­hara also calls for numer­ous extended bas­soon tech­niques, includ­ing pitch bends, key clicks, extreme vibrato, and a low A exten­sion tube for each player’s instrument.

The stan­dard wind octet, com­pris­ing pairs of oboes, clar­inets, horns, and bas­soons, was a devel­op­ment of the Clas­si­cal era. Emperor Joseph II appointed the first group with this par­tic­u­lar instru­men­ta­tion in 1782, but smaller groups employ­ing either oboes or clar­inets (but not both) were com­mon in much of Europe by the 1760s. These and var­i­ous small wind groups extant in the first half of the 18 th cen­tury were likely inspired by the long tra­di­tion of wind bands retained by the French monar­chy, per­haps specif­i­cally Les Grands Haut­bois of Louis XIV.

In their full octet con­fig­u­ra­tion, these Har­monien often per­formed par­tial or full-length tran­scrip­tions of opera and bal­let scores as din­ner or other back­ground music. A num­ber of com­posers, includ­ing W.A. Mozart and Franz Krom­mer, also wrote works specif­i­cally for octet and sim­i­lar groups. An exam­ple of on octet being employed for dinner-time enter­tain­ment can be found in Mozart’s Don Gio­vanni: as Gio­vanni eats and awaits the arrival of the statue of the late Com­menda­tore, he is ser­e­naded by a Har­monie play­ing, among other things, “Non pi ‏ ù andrai ” from Le nozze di Figaro. Like much of the Har­monie music, the octet on tonight’s pro­gram con­sists of music orig­i­nally writ­ten for an orches­tra. How­ever, the ensem­ble in ques­tion did not play in an opera or bal­let pit – it was Pérez Prado’s mambo orchestra.

Dámaso Pérez Prado, the self-proclaimed “King of Mambo,” was born in Cuba in 1916. He worked as a pianist and arranger for casino orches­tras in Havana through the 1940s before mov­ing to Mex­ico City in 1948. There, he formed his own band, which recorded exten­sively for RCA Vic­tor. Although Prado did not invent the mambo, he was cer­tainly instru­men­tal in pop­u­lar­iz­ing the genre, par­tic­u­larly in the United States. The Mambo Suite is a set of four Pérez Prado mam­bos arranged by Mex­i­can com­poser and pianist Euge­nio Tou­s­saint for Sin­foni­etta Ven­tus, a wind octet based in Mex­ico City.

At the age of thir­teen, Bill Dou­glas had been tak­ing piano lessons for nine years, writ­ing songs for five, had taught him­self ukulele and gui­tar, and had just started play­ing the bas­soon. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in music edu­ca­tion from the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto and Master’s degrees in bas­soon and com­po­si­tion from Yale. Dou­glas taught at Cal Arts in Valen­cia, Cal­i­for­nia through much of the 1970s. Since 1977, he has bal­anced teach­ing at the Naropa Insti­tute in Boul­der, Col­orado with exten­sive per­form­ing, record­ing, and com­pos­ing schedules.

Douglas’s Suite Can­tando was com­mis­sioned in 2005 by a group of 51 clar­inetists, bas­soon­ists, and pianists from the United States, Canada, and Sin­ga­pore. The first move­ment (“Sam­bata”) com­bines ele­ments of Brazil­ian samba and Cuban batá rhythms. Move­ment two (“Can­zona”) draws on many diverse sources, rang­ing from jazz to Josquin des Prez. An F major blues forms the core of the third move­ment, a trib­ute to Miles Davis. “Cantabile” – the fourth move­ment – is slow and lyri­cal, exploit­ing the var­i­ous tone color pos­si­bil­i­ties of the trio. The final move­ment (“Bebop Capric­cio”) is based on the chord pro­gres­sion of “Slow Boat to China,” a song writ­ten by Frank Loesser in 1947 that has since become a jazz standard.

Hugh Mar­tin and Ralph Blane wrote “The Boy Next Door” for the 1944 movie musi­cal Meet Me in St. Louis. In it, Esther (played by Judy Gar­land) sings of her love for her next-door neigh­bor, John Tru­itt. She is con­vinced that he will never notice her, but John even­tu­ally asks for her hand in mar­riage. “The Boy Next Door” has been recorded numer­ous times, by a diverse col­lec­tion of artists includ­ing Martha Raye, Bill Evans, Woody Her­man, Oscar Peter­son, and Con­way Twitty.

Antonin Dvořák wrote his Sym­phony No. 9 – sub­ti­tled “From the New World” – in 1893, in the mid­dle of a multi-year stay in the United States. In the piece, which was com­mis­sioned by the New York Phil­har­monic, Dvořák employed mate­r­ial inspired by Native-and African-American musics and cul­tures along­side more tra­di­tional Euro­pean themes. The sec­ond move­ment (“Largo”) was inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, and Dvořák saw the move­ment as a sketch for a large dra­matic work based on the poem (although he never wrote such a work).

In 1922, William Arms Fisher, one of Dvořák’s Amer­i­can stu­dents, adapted the main theme of the “Largo,” added words, and pub­lished it as “Goin’ Home.” The song was billed as a “Negro Spir­i­tual” despite the fact that its lyri­cist and its com­poser were both thor­oughly white. The most widely-known record­ing of “Goin’ Home” was made by bass Paul Robe­son in 1958, but it has also been recorded as a jazz tune by Tommy Dorsey, Jack Tea­gar­den, Rah­saan Roland Kirk, and Yusef Lateef, among others.

Miles Davis recorded “The Serpent’s Tooth” in only one record­ing ses­sion – Jan­u­ary 30, 1953. The two takes of the tune recorded that day appear on the album Collector’s Items, released later that year. In the early 1950s, Davis recorded with a vari­ety of small groups – his first Quin­tet (which became the Sex­tet with the addi­tion of Can­non­ball Adderly) would not be formed until 1955. At this par­tic­u­lar ses­sion, the group com­prised Sonny Rollins and Char­lie Parker on tenor sax, Wal­ter Bishop on piano, Percy Heath on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums.