Mary Lou Williams (1910-81)
Thursday, August 15, 2024
Royal Albert Hall, London
The four Ellington pieces came over well in Morton Gould’s ‘insider’ arrangements – as Sophisticated as the Lady herself, open to Moods, not only Indigo and Solitude, and this particular Caravan travelled well, exotic images conjured, the BBC Scottish members and Ilan Volkov at-one with Ellington’s tunesmithery and Gould’s glossy nod to Hollywood in his scoring.
Following Leonard Slatkin and St. Louis Symphony introducing me to it earlier this year, I was delighted to be reacquainted with Mary Lou Williams’s Zodiac Suite (1945, if published posthumously), twelve movements (of course), a mix of matters astrological and portraiture of colleagues (including Dizzy Gillespie and Art Tatum), orchestrated by the composer, consistently inventive and enjoyable, as here, with once again Aaron Diehl on piano, plus David Wong, bass, and Gregory Hutchinson, drums, and other soloists. This performance ended with ‘Pisces’ and involved Mikaela Bennett (I don’t recall a singer in St. Louis, although I believe there are multiple versions of the whole) in a curious number that seemed rooted in pastiche.
The second half, music by Anthony Braxton (born 1945, Chicago). Orchestrally his scores are fully notated, less so for the Braxton “experts” also performing. Fully rehearsed or not, quite where the other pieces listed in addition to Composition No.27 begin and end I couldn’t say, nor does it seem to matter given no two performances can ever be identical, even if exactly the same Compositions are chosen; it might be (apparently) that something rehearsed doesn’t get played at all, and vice versa. (A Stockhausen influence?) Two conductors (with their instruments) joined Volkov (indicating with hand signals and cue cards I gather) for a magnetic and eventful thirty-three-minute one-off (which to my mind had direction and logic) and I am now keen to explore Braxton’s output further, to locate his range and what he stimulates in those who champion him.
Duke Ellington, arr. Morton Gould: Solitude, Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, Caravan
Mary Lou Williams: Zodiac Suite
Anthony Braxton: Composition no.27 (+46, 59, 63, 146, 147, 151, Language Music)
Ingrid Laubrock (saxophone)
James Fei (saxophone/conductor)
Katherine Young (bassoon/conductor)
Chris Lewis (clarinet/saxophone)
Brandon Lee (trumpet)
Mikaela Bennett (soprano)
Aaron Diehl Trio
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov
“Ilan Volkov and friends celebrate milestones from the past 100 years of American jazz, starting with a sequence honouring the ‘Duke’. Mary Lou Williams’s Zodiac Suite from 1945 romps between boogie-woogie and dissonance in its response to astrological signs. The evening culminates in the work of a boundary-crossing visionary. From the south side of Chicago, multi-instrumentalist and self-styled ‘trans-idiomatic composer’ Anthony Braxton has established himself as a composer whose imagination recognises no bounds.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021pxw