Classical, jazz swing together

Chicago Tribune
By Howard Reich | Tribune arts critic
Published September 19, 2007
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In 1965, the inventive William Russo founded the Chicago Jazz Ensemble.

In 1987, the visionary Paul Freeman founded the Chicago Sinfonietta.

But it wasn’t until Monday night that these two distinctive ensembles joined forces.

And though Russo did not live to see this collaboration (he died in 2003, at 74), everything about his eclectic resume suggests he would have embraced it.

Certainly the large audience that crowded into Symphony Center welcomed the jazz-meets-the-classics venture, judging by the enthusiasm of its response.

Moreover, this was no typical symphony crowd, even though the event marked the downtown launch of the Sinfonietta’s 21st season. With jazz and classical listeners both represented, the concert shattered barriers that generally, and needlessly, separate the two idioms.

Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” served as the common ground for the opening of the program, the Sinfonietta’s performance of excerpts of the original answered by the Chicago Jazz Ensemble’s rendition of the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn version.

Granted, this was neither the first nor the last time that stylistically disparate bands met on the pages of “Peer Gynt” (Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra dueled with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra in the same music in 1999).

But the gentle lyricism and pastel-tone painting that Freeman drew from his Sinfonietta made this a particularly affecting account. Once Chicago Jazz Ensemble artistic director Jon Faddis and his band took the stage, Grieg’s pastoral Norwegian score gave way to all-American urban swing. Yet for all the blues sensibility and virtuoso solos that Faddis encouraged in his band, the CJE matched the light tone and refined timbres of Freeman’s Sinfonietta.

The main event occurred at the end of the evening, when the Sinfonietta and the CJE performed together in Luther Henderson’s arrangement of Ellington’s orchestral tone poem “Harlem.” Here, both bands often played full tilt, the Sinfonietta’s string passages serving as plush cushion for the roaring horns of the CJE.

Elsewhere in the program, Sinfonietta percussionist Robert Everson played the extended solo in Russell Peck’s “Harmonic Rhythm: Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra,” in a performance that stressed long-lined phrase-making over melodramatic gestures. And Faddis played (fortissimo) to the heavens in Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local.”