The Blues and Beyond (2008)

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of playing my double concerto, The Blues & Beyond with the Stockton Symphony in northern California.  I have been lucky enough to collaborate many times with this vibrant orchestra led by my good friend Peter Jaffe. I hadn’t played “The Blues & Beyond” in about 6 years and it was an interesting experience to jump back into it; kind of like seeing an old friend from college that you hadn’t hung out with for a while. What’s even better, when you are the composer, is to go through the process of rehearsing with a good orchestra and a very invested conductor with ample rehearsal time to “dig in” to the music.  (Adequate rehearsal time is rare in the Classical world.)  Maestro Jaffe really understands my compositions and their many stylistic references; from Swing, to Latin, to Classical, to Blues to Hip Hop, and influences from composers like Stravinsky to Shostakovich; Bernstein to  Count Basie and Frank Zappa. Of course there are Brubeckian threads weaving throughout the score. 

 This concerto for trumpet and trombone, The Blues & Beyond, was written with a major compositional proposition:  What if you represented the concept of the Blues on the emotional level and stayed true to that melancholic vibe but expanded the harmonic language used by the orchestra and the soloists?  For example, the great artist B.B. King made The Thrill is Gone a worldwide hit. It is a beautifully simple, minor blues.  But as a composer, if you went for that same mood and expanded the harmonic language and used many jazz chord substitutions over the basic 12 bar Blues structure, you would be heading more in the direction of Duke Ellington.  This is the impressionistic direction of the slow 2nd Movement of The Blues & Beyond.

Here’s a short clip of Movement II: https://youtu.be/zGpiY1oB11g

But the Blues can also be driving, joyful, and in a major key. You can find that in some great Count Basie recordings, or Chuck Berry, even early Beatles playing American Blues. (For example, the famous tune Kansas City is a Blues but it is not sad at all – it rollicks and romps in a soulful way.)  What if you kept that rhythmic mood and energy but expanded the harmonic language so that the orchestra was playing hard, swinging polytonal licks.  Then, how about expanding the Blues even further, transferring  some Bluesy  driving shuffle  grooves into Afro/Cuban rhythms that branch out into the non-traditional time signature of  5/4.  On top of that, overlay it with a lilting 12/8 groove which implies ¾ over the 5/4.  This happens in the finale of the 3rd Movement of The Blues & Beyond.

 What was rewarding to me as a composer is that this underlying idea and architecture really held up after all these years.  Although there are thousands of notes being played by the orchestra and dozens of little musical sections, the basic premise as described above glues the piece together.  The trumpet soloist, (in this case Stephen Goforth from Tulsa who rescued us as the last minute replacement for the original trumpet player) and me on trombone are encouraged to take improvisatory liberties. The more we did, the better and more authentic the piece sounded. Mr. Goforth and I and Peter Jaffe were not nervous at all when we took the stage. We huddled in the wings right before we went on and said to each other “let’s go out there, have fun and kick some butt!” That’s exactly what happened and the camaraderie between the three of us and the orchestra resulted in an exciting and joyful performance.

 The audience felt all that creative energy and this orchestral performance lifted everyone’s spirits in a particularly American way! 

The Blues is American music, it originated in the South and evolved while going up the Mississippi. But the orchestra was invented in Europe, and this concert proved once again that two musical cultures can come together  and play off each other in an engaging way. Melting Pot music from a Melting Pot society; that’s what I’m talking about!