Group Therapy - Jim McNeely

Jun

5

Group Therapy - Jim McNeely

≡ Category: 2000s, Essential, Progressive Big Band, Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

Jim McNeely makes most jazz arrangers seem like complete fuddy duddies. He routinely takes other people’s compositions and turns them inside out, invariably finding new things to say. His own compositions are unique. McNeely sounds like no one else.

Take The Fruit, a composition by Bud Powell. McNeely starts off with a fragment of the melody, taken by the entire tentet and then interrupts it with a rapidly bowed bass note, like a buzzing of a fly. He then breaks down the melody even further, isolating different instrumental combinations: flute and piano, trombone and flute, trumpet and trombone, and so on. Then he starts playing these instrumental combinations off of each other with musical fragments of Powell’s head. Eventually, he gets to a statement of the melody. It’s an ingenious approach.

McNeely has wonderful musicians working with him, all veterans of the New York downtown scene, none of which I had heard of before listening to the Vanguard Orchestra’s recording Lickety Split, which is also fantastic.

On The Fruit, McNeely makes room for solos from Billy Drews on alto, Scott Wendholt on trumpet, Ed Neumeister on trombone, Dick Oatts on alto sax, Tony Kadleck on trumpet, Scott Robinson on bari sax, Tom Varner on French horn, Cameron Brown on bass, John Hollenbeck on drums, and McNeely himself on piano. Never once did I catch any of these guys in a lazy or unoriginal phrase. On the basis of these solos, I’d be happy to listen to any of these guys’ individual projects.

And I love the way McNeely uses these musicians, too.

No boring solos over several choruses for McNeely. He arranges his tunes so there are specific gaps for his soloists, which keeps both the listener and the musicians on their toes.

Or take another example, McNeely’s original Cranky Takes A Holiday. He starts it off with a drum solo, which is unusual to start with when you’re talking about larger ensemble writing. Then we get an energetic stop and start head, which somehow manages to swing like mad. It kills me how McNeely completely avoids having bass player Cameron Brown walk traditionally and still manages to maintain an enviable sense of swing. In the middle of Billy Drews solo on soprano sax, McNeely halves the time for a more traditional swing feel. I’ve got to mention Ed Neumeister’s solo on trombone here. He’s got crazy bebop chops, but is inerrantly musical in his note choices. He’s also got incredible tone. Great player.

But McNeely isn’t through surprising us on Cranky Takes A Holiday. Somewhere along the line, the tune morphs into a Caribbean groove for a while before reverting to the original style for a raucous finish. I guess the Caribbean groove was the holiday part.

McNeely’s rendition of Silent Night (yes, the Christmas carol) is amazing. The tune is completely unrecognizable for a long time because McNeely has completely reharmonized it. When the melody finally emerges, it’s completely unexpected and yet somehow inevitable.

Jim McNeely is a consummate arranger for big band. He understands the potential for each instrument in a jazz context as surely as Bartok did for an orchestra in a classical context. He’s intellectually curious, prying apart the DNA of each song to see how it works. He is thoroughly familiar with and understands the history of jazz arranging, and brings all that knowledge to bear in his arrangements. To top it all off, as sophisticated as his composing and arranging is, Jim McNeely’s writing is extremely accessible.

Group Therapy features one excellent arrangement after another, performed by master musicians. It would be hard to imagine a better big band album. Actually, I slightly prefer Lickety Split over Group Therapy, but Jim McNeely’s only competition as a big band arranger is Jim McNeely.