In a dressing room Behind the Stage in the Metropolitan Opera House, Wynton Marsalis, The Trumpeter and Educator, Intently Watched a Live Feed of the Big Band Representing the Osceola County School for the Arts, From Kissimmee, FLA. They were playing dizzy gillespie’s “things to come,” a piece that can expose any weaknesses in a big band. Being a good jazz musician is not only about playing fast and loud and high, but this song requires that musicians all do that.
The cheating player of the school was in the middle of a solo. A agile player who could hit the high notes, he sounded like a professional. “Look, the director is going to wave the background here,” said Mr. Marsalis, with the help of a colorful language to say that the soloist had not yet received his good stuff.
The director then made a small gesture to the rest of his band and said they had to wait to have the solo developed. It was a graph that Mr. Marsalis had heard at least hundreds of times live, but every time it is full of small decisions like this, making it a new experience.
It was almost a century since the orchestra of Duke Ellington became the house band in the Cotton Club on 142nd Street. Even there, where Ellington and his group played black musicians for a completely white audience, it was expected that customers were active listeners. Ellington is quoted in the book “Duke Ellington’s America” said the club said “absolutely silence” during performances, and that everyone that made noise would be brought out quickly.
Ellington knew that his work had a signature. He wrote with certain members of his orchestra, such as the saxophonist Johnny Hodges or the trumpet player Cootie Williams, in mind, and he believed that no one else could sound, no matter how hard they tried.
Still, on Ellington, teenagers from all over the world did an annual Big band festival organized by Jazz in Lincoln Center and teenagers from all over the world kept their best to channel those musicians.
This year, in honor of the 30 -year anniversary of the festival, 30 Big bands of the 127 that are sent to New York in application caps came to compete for the highest honor, higher than the usual 15. The finalists include 27 American groups and bands from Australia, Japan and Spain. Each group selected three numbers to perform from the essentially Ellington Library. The top 10 finishers went on to a second and last, competitive round. The top three then played an exhibition concert – in the Opera House instead of Jazz in the Rose Room of Lincoln Center, because the extra capacity was needed – before a winner was announced.
But the atmosphere of the event, although it is demanding, does not feel like something from the film “Whiplash” – At least not anymore. Years ago, the organizers found that the competition was killed and looked to mitigate his edges. Now students perform, but Jammen also jam with children, clinics with professionals and have meals where they are not at school, but because of the instrument they play. In the corridors, members of different schools spontaneously burst into songs.
“It’s just like the Top Arts Festival,” said Julius Tolentino, the Jazz director of Newark Academy in Livingston, NJ, whose band won the competition in 2024. “
The work of the organization is not limited to the competition. It has an annual training program for band directors and sends professional musicians, often members of the Jazz in Lincoln Center Orchestra, to help bands that are eligible for the final.
The festival also acts as a tool for creating a Big Band canon. For 30 years, the Jazz has made sheet music in the Lincoln Center team for pieces by Ellington and some of his contemporaries, such as Gillespie or Graaf Basie or Benny Carter, and sent it to schools interested in competing. That process is not always simple and often means that the archives of the Smithsonian are dug to look at existing, handwritten scores and transcribe of recordings.
“There is a philosophy that Jazz is a methodology, not an art form with a canon,” said Todd Stoll, the vice president of education at Jazz in Lincoln Center. “The historical point of view of this music was, I will not say, but it was not something that was a lot of attention at university level. I went all the way in a master’s degree in a large conservatory. I never played a note of the music of Duke Ellington.”
That would now be incomprehensible, partly because of the work that Jazz did in Lincoln Center. Mr. Marsalis was about the idea that Ellington was not an international star before the festival existed, but essentially Ellington, and the work that makes it possible, can do as much as everything to ensure that his work persists.
For Mr. Marsalis, who has been in the center of Debates about jazz canon for decades, this can be a victory round. But he is in essence Ellington as an example of how playing old music does not have to be a retarded looking endeavor.
“We are not cynical,” he said. “If you draw up a new mythology, how much time do you have to attack old mythology? Every band that auditions for a place in New York is part of that new mythology, an example of how the music is not a historical document, but something that lives as long as it is interpreted.”
However, experience can be intimidating until you are part of it.
Then Dr. Ollie Liddell, the band director at Memphis Central High School in Memphis, saw videos for the first time on YouTube of groups that had reached the final of the Ellington Festival, more than ten years ago, he thought to himself: “We will never have a band so good.”
Memphis Central is a public high school, and just like most public school band directors is Dr. Liddell responsible for not only the jazz band, but also the marching band and concert seams. He has to deal with fundraising and convince clinicians to come in and work with his band. None of his jazz students receive private instruction, Save One, who receives lessons from a Memphis Central Alumnus about Zoom. In essence, Ellington cannot always be thought.
That is not the case for many of the groups that reach New York, with art magnet schools and private academies that offer instrument -specific instructors, and a number of students who also take private lessons. But even without that luxury, a resourceful director and passionate children can still compete. The proof? Memphis Central achieved first place in this year’s competition.
It is a cliché to say that Jazz is an interactive music, a conversation. But those conversations are not limited to the stage. On Saturday, during the last performance for the jury members, Memphis Central came the stage and the sound of Ellington’s “Rockabye River” all came at the same time. The rumbling of the low Tom of the drum set. The scream of the horns. The growling trumpet soloist who underlines each of the written sentences.
The work was brought to life and made new. A crowd filled with competitors and rivals was with broad eyes and open mouths, with what their approval.
None of them was clearly cynical.
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