Jazz Meets Contemporary at Jazz Showcase

By Alexander Hough in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 24, 2009 6:00PM

Innovative, thoughtful programming and unorthodox venues were hallmarks of Anaphora's inaugural season, and it looks like they'll be picking up where they left off with tomorrow night's opener of their Contemporary Series at the Jazz Showcase. The concert will highlight a recent contemporary music trend of incorporating jazz in more sophisticated ways. Many of the early attempts to combine the two genres treated jazz as a novelty - an orchestra playing swing eighth notes, say - but now the fusion is becoming more organic and less overt, due in large part to a shrinking music world that allows composers to be exposed to and influenced by a wider variety of sources. Augusta Reed Thomas, the former Chicago Symphony Orchestra Composer-in-Residence whose “D(i)agon(als)” for solo clarinet will be performed Tuesday, described this new approach:

It is clear, in all my works, that I have been listening to jazz for 30 years. I am not a composer who does empty-headed "cross-over" jazz pieces where the jazz bits make all the jazzer's blush with embarrassment.... rather, there is a deeply integrated and digested set of references and perfumes which can be sensed.

You can also smell these perfumes on "Cheating, Lying, Stealing," David Lang's dark, creeping homage to the more disreputable parts of his personality. Other pieces on the concert embrace the jazz idiom more explicitly: Chicago composer Gregory Hutter's "Melancholy Rags," which is what piece's title describes, and Barry Cockroft's "Beat Me," a piece for solo saxophone that Anaphora founder Sarah Ritch describes as "a jazz solo...cut up and put into a collage." Wrapping up the first half will be an arrangement of "Solea" from Miles Davis and Gil Evans's 1960 collaboration, "Sketches of Spain," one of the first - and certainly one of the first successful - jazz-classical combinations. Local jazzman Rob Parton will be featured on the piece, as well as on the entire second half as Anaphora members Bryan Den Hartog (drums) and Christian Anderson (trumpet) join Rob Clearfield (piano) and Patrick Mulcahy (bass) to accompany him on a straight-up jazz set.

The Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, Tuesday, August 25, at 8:00 p.m., $10