Advance Program Notes John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble Sunday, February 10, 2019, 7 PM

These Advance Program Notes are provided online for our patrons who like to read about performances ahead of time. Printed programs will be provided to patrons at the performances. Programs are subject to change.

John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble

Ben Kono, soprano/alto/tenor sax and flute Jeremy Viner, clarinet and tenor sax Dan Willis, soprano/tenor sax , flute and tenor sax Bohdan Hilash, clar/bass clarinet and bass sax

Mark Patterson, trombone Mike Christianson, trombone Curtis Hasselbring, trombone Jennifer Wharton, bass trombone

Jon Owens, trumpet and flugelhorn James De La Garza, trumpet and flugelhorn Dave Ballou, trumpet and flugelhorn Matt Holman, trumpet and flugelhorn

Chris Tordini, acoustic and electric bass Matt Mitchell, piano, organ, and keyboard Patricia Brennan, vibes, marimba, and glockenspiel John Hollenbeck, drums and composition Theo Bleckmann, voice

JC Sanford, conductor Stepan Dyachkovskiy, sound engineer

The program will be announced from the stage and will include selections from All Can Work, A Blessing, and eternal interlude. Program Notes

From the Liner Notes of All Can Work

After pondering many titles for this record, I realized All Can Work epitomizes the flexible, optimistic resolve that is needed by everyone involved to do a record like this. This phrase, “All Can Work,” and the lyrics in this title track are taken directly from the emails in my inbox from Laurie Frink, our beloved trumpeter, whom we lost in 2013. When I first moved to NYC and started playing with and hearing big bands, Laurie was a special thread that wove through them all—it seemed like she played in every band I saw! A master of the short, perfect email reply, Laurie was also the consummate team player, the type of personality that is profoundly needed in a large ensemble. Her sudden death stunned the NYC music community—but the legacy she left behind as the trumpet guru/therapist/doctor to countless brass and woodwind players lives on, continuing to support and enhance the community she served. No matter where I am in the world, I can talk to a trumpet player who had studied with or knows her exercises. All Can Work is based on one of these exercises. (Thank you to Dave Ballou for opening up the Laurie exercise archives to a drummer!) After Laurie died, I read all of her emails and then compiled them in chronological order. In her words, I began to see a poem of sorts, and the words helped me keep the focus on Laurie as I started to compose. I really sweated this piece because I wanted it to showcase Laurie’s ever-present humor, her dedication to “the music,” and most importantly our love for her. Thank you to Theo for bringing forth these characteristics of Laurie so beautifully with his voice.

The rest of this is inspired by and dedicated to other great artists that have given me guidance and/ or inspiration throughout the years: Bob Brookmeyer, Kenny Wheeler, Billy Strayhorn, John Taylor, William Shakespeare, and Piet Mondrian. This collection is especially personal in that Bob, Kenny, John, and Laurie were dear friends of mine who died in recent years. These four artists in particular represent to me a certain type of musician who is authentically humble and unquestionably under-appreciated. My hope is that this recording serves to honor and highlight their undeniable impact on the world of music. Shakespeare, Strayhorn, and Mondrian are obviously not personal friends, but have touched me so deeply with their craft that I was inspired to write and/or arrange these works, which helped me dive deeper into their work.

Elf was commissioned by the Chicago Festival for the Strayhorn centennial in 2015. This piece was titled and known as Elf when it was written in 1963 before it was retitled and repurposed by Duke Ellington as Isfahan for the Far East Suite. Because I loved the original feel and arrangement of Strayhorn’s Elf, I chose to create something that was a polar opposite. John Wojciechowski (of the Chicago Jazz Orchestra) is to blame for the extremely high register. When I was writing it, I kept asking him if the register was ok, and he kept saying it was cool, so I kept going higher! On this recording our own Tony Malaby puts his soprano voodoo on those high notes.

Heyoke is dedicated to Kenny Wheeler and John Taylor, both of whom I had the pleasure of playing with many times. In the “fun facts” department: I once played in a big band rehearsal when Kenny played lead trumpet—he was giddy at the chance to play lead; and John is responsible for the one time I was not allowed into Canada (a good long story that I can tell you over a tasty cider that you will buy me)! Kenny was featured at the 2011 FONT Festival in NYC and [John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble (JHLE)] was thrilled and honored to perform with him for two special nights at the Jazz Standard. I had remembered playing Heyoke with Kenny in the past, so I was surprised after receiving the music from him for big band that he had only arranged one of the three movements—the ballad—of that small group version, which he recorded on Gnu High. For the FONT Festival, I decided to arrange the other two movements and then segue into his ballad movement. In this recorded version, we stop after the introduction to his ballad, a gesture that I think fittingly symbolizes the incomplete feeling we all had when Kenny and then John departed this earth. Matt Holman, Jacob Garchik, and Matt Mitchell share the improvisatory duties with unabashed enthusiasm and sometimes wild abandon. this kiss came about from University of Northern Colorado professor Dana Landry’s ambitious Romeo and Juliet project. I studied Shakespeare in my early years like many other students, but was not mature enough to truly understand his genius at that time. I now have a renewed appreciation for his work after revisiting Romeo and Juliet while composing this kiss. I am impressed by the clarity and efficiency with which Shakespeare’s work can Program Notes, continued convey complex emotional human experience within exacting frames—and specifically how successfully he did so within a sonnet form. He did not waste a single word, nor did he allow the strict form to limit his creativity of expression. Inspired mainly by the concise precision with which Shakespeare penned one of his most famous sonnets, I created a simple Romeo motive, a simple Juliet motive, and a concise musical theme based on this sonnet form. I developed the material as if I was scoring this scene for film, quickly cutting from intimate conversations to full dance scenes. I treated the individual musicians as if they were the individual characters from this passage. Sometimes they interact in small groups, sometimes large (as in the dance scenes), and sometimes there are small and larger conversations going on simultaneously. The material is put together to meld a mood of sweet romance in the present with a foreboding dissonance that foreshadows the future. My title, this kiss, uses these two significant words that both Romeo and Juliet recite in the opening stanzas of their sonnet. Matt Mitchell does his own freestyle dance around the band in a later section that represents the sweet tenderness and excitement of these two lovers. from trees was commissioned by the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts and was premiered by the University of the Arts Big Band under the direction of Matt Gallagher with original choreography by Netta Yerushalmy in 2011 in Philadelphia. Having always liked Mondrian’s later works, I chose for the first time to delve into his earlier works and immediately noticed his studies of trees. For this composition, I chose three works that encompass his oeuvre: The Gray Trees, the cubist-inspired Composition with Oval, and his last unfinished painting (in the De Stijl style) Broadway Boogie-Woogie. I incorporated a boogie-woogie feel into the whole piece while trying to evoke the development and evolution of the lines of a tree in his earlier paintings to the bold straight black lines in his last painting. In this recorded version, Dave Ballou and Tony Malaby are creating their own paintings on my compositional canvas.

Long Swing Dream started as an actual dream. For the first and so far only time, I dreamed an actual piece. In my dream, the bass line was the focal point and the horns mostly passed around this one long note. Realizing later that the initials for this title are LSD, I found some curious Cary Grant musings about his own transformative experiences with LSD and added them to deepen the dream-like effect.

The first piece on the record,lud, is one of those intangible pieces that just popped out recently. I don’t have an explanation for it but I wish I could write more music like this. And by “like this,” I mean strangely alluring or alluringly strange. The title I came upon by chance, perhaps when looking for words that rhyme with dud? I like this title because it either means “Lord,” as when addressing a judge, or it is an acronym for Local Usage Details (a record of local calls from a particular phone number), or perhaps it is first name of a famous Russian jazz bandleader. Either way, this piece and I are now good friends, so I intend to further develop this into a concert length work in the future.

The Model, a Kraftwerk classic, was suggested by Theo Bleckmann for my Songs I Like a Lot album, and since that time it has been a fun piece to play live with various bands. And I think it is a nice way to leave you— hopefully it will make you move and sing…and come back for another listen!

I have not yet been able to pen a fitting tribute to Bob Brookmeyer—and I’m not sure that I can, or if one composition would even be enough. So I dedicate this entire album to him, because it simply would not exist without him and I miss him terribly.

—John Hollenbeck Biographies

JOHN HOLLENBECK LARGE ENSEMBLE

“John Hollenbeck, a drummer and composer, is one of today’s most dynamic orchestral jazz bandleaders, a fact that’s reinforced by the release of All Can Work, the arresting new album from his Large Ensemble.” —Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times John Hollenbeck is one of the rare artists who have mastered the tradition of big band composition while crossing aesthetic boundaries and speaking directly to the time we live in today. His music is a daring mix of pure, heart-on-sleeve lyricism and robust rhythmic propulsion, as well as an audacious example of the power of big band jazz to express emotions well beyond swing-era clichés. His music for this group has earned acclaim for its rich, panoramic orchestral textures that retain the power of its members’ individual voices.

Unlike most contemporary big bands, this is no random agglomeration of freelancers—the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble is an actual band consisting of top New York musicians. Hollenbeck had been writing for big band since he was in college at the Eastman School of Music and eventually formed the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble in 1998 as an outlet to write the kind of music that wasn’t being written for this style of big band. “I saw some things that could be done that weren’t being done, and I thought there might be some other possibilities with a group that still has traditional instrumentation but the music itself is not traditional,” Hollenbeck said. He gathered together a core group of musician friends who he had studied with at Eastman and then selected a group of New York City musician friends and colleagues to complete the ensemble, creating a fine balance of camaraderie, integrity and talent—the perfect outlet for the creative expression of his music.

“John Hollenbeck’s 18-piece Large Ensemble can explode with rhythmic drive and technical dazzle, or it can evoke serene calm, tone poetry, and even prayer. It’s a big band for a new eclectic world, building on the legacy of seminal big-band composer Bob Brookmeyer and other role models. Hollenbeck holds it together with intricate drumming, compositional acumen, and searing wit as he marshals the resources of top jazz improvisers, including saxophonist Tony Malaby and vocalist Theo Bleckmann.” —David Adler, TimeOut New York

The John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble’s third album, All Can Work, was released to critical acclaim on New Amsterdam Records in January 2018 and pays tribute to the Large Ensemble’s late trumpet player, Laurie Frink, a key force in the group and the jazz community. All Can Work garnered the ensemble’s third Grammy nomination—their second album, eternal interlude, and their debut release, A Blessing, all earned Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Large Ensemble Album. As Downbeat Magazine’s Frank Alkyer said of the group’s latest release, “John Hollenbeck’s All Can Work is an album of awe-inspiring majesty...Hollenbeck delivers layer after layer for listeners to explore. Shimmering horns, beautifully placed punctuations, and little sonic surprises abound. It’s wonderfully complex music played beautifully, with precision and abandon, by a band that has spent a good deal of time together.”

JOHN HOLLENBECK, composer, drummer, percussionist, and educator It’s traditional, when paying compliment to drummers, to draw comparisons with the octopus, implying agility beyond the means of a paltry pair of human hands. But when considering John Hollenbeck, the multi-limbed creature that seems most appropriate to invoke is the mythical hydra; for while Hollenbeck is certainly no stranger to rhythmic intricacy, it’s ideas that seem to spring forth like so many heads, two more arising as one falls away.

Hollenbeck is a composer of music uncategorizable beyond the fact of being always identifiably his. A conceptualist able to translate the traditions of jazz and new music into a fresh, eclectic, forward-looking language of his own invention that is intellectually rewarding yet ever accessibly vibrant. A drummer and percussionist possessed of a playful versatility and a virtuosic wit. Most of all, a musical thinker—whether Biographies, continued putting pen to paper or conjuring spontaneous sound—allergic to repetition, forever seeking to surprise himself and his audiences.

The prolific and unpredictable nature of Hollenbeck’s output has been evident since he first emerged as a leader in late 2001, releasing four completely different within a matter of months. Three of them (Quartet Lucy, the duo CD Static Still, and no images, featuring several different configurations) introduced the partnership of Hollenbeck and iconoclastic vocalist Theo Bleckmann, who continue to collaborate in a variety of offbeat settings. Along with keyboardist Gary Versace, they form the Refuge Trio, as boundary-free a small group as one is likely to find.

The last of that initial burst of creativity was the self-titled debut of the Claudia Quintet, Hollenbeck’s longest- running ensemble. Over the course of its eight CDs, Claudia has cemented its reputation as one of the most innovative and adaptable units in modern jazz, so deftly attuned to one another that Hollenbeck’s most dizzying compositional leaps are taken with an air of playfulness and skewed humor. Claudia’s latest release, Super Petite, is a potent package that condenses virtuoso playing and a wealth of ideas into 10 compact songs. Claudia has received grants from the Chamber Music America New Jazz Works: Commissioning and Ensemble Development program to compose a suite which was recorded for 2009’s Royal Toast, and from Arts International and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation to travel to Brazil, Nepal, and Canada for performances. The quintet was commissioned by the University of Rochester to set the work of Kenneth Patchen as part of their 100th birthday celebration of the groundbreaking poet, which can be heard on the 2011 release What Is the Beautiful?, featuring vocals by Bleckmann and Kurt Elling. The Claudia Quintet can also be heard performing the theme music to Poetry Off the Shelf, a weekly audio program on poetryfoundation.org. Hollenbeck has been acclaimed for his unique twist on big band music—most notably through the work of the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble (JHLE), which trades the gale force blowing of most such bands for a multi-hued palette of tonal colors and rich, evocative atmospheres. Their third album, All Can Work, released January 2018, pays tribute to the Large Ensemble’s late trumpet player Laurie Frink, a key force in the group and the jazz community. The JHLE received Grammy nominations for its first two releases: A Blessing in 2006 and eternal interlude in 2009. Hollenbeck was nominated again in 2013 for his arrangement of Jimmy Webb’s The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress from the album Songs I Like a Lot, commissioned and recorded by the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, featuring vocalists Kate McGarry and Bleckmann and pianist Versace. That album and its companion piece, 2015’s Songs We Like a Lot, puckishly reimagine pop songs by the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Daft Punk, Queen, and Burt Bacharach with big band arrangements, transforming familiar songs with surprising insight and audacious wit.

The composer’s large-band pieces have also been recorded by Austria’s Jazz Bigband Graz on 2006’s critically- acclaimed Joys and Desires. In 2010 the CMA/FACE French-American Jazz Exchange Program awarded Hollenbeck a grant to develop work with Daniel Yvinec and the Orchestre National de Jazz of France, resulting in the release of Shut up and Dance (Bee Jazz), which included the Grammy-nominated composition Falling Men. If these projects can safely be termed “jazz” (at least by those comfortable with the label’s more progressive interpretations), they should by no means be taken as indicating that Hollenbeck’s output is limited to even that genre’s most elastic borders. His growing body of commissioned compositions relate just as obliquely to the “new music” tag, exemplifying his ability to not so much defy categorization as to evolve beyond its necessity. One of Hollenbeck’s earliest appearances on record was as the composer of The Shape of Spirit, a piece for wind ensemble issued on the Mons label in 1998. The following year he composed Processional and Desiderata for wind ensemble and orator (released by Challenge Records in 2001), written for and featuring the voice and trombone of John’s mentor, Bob Brookmeyer.

John’s piece The Cloud of Unknowing, commissioned by the Bamberg Choir in Germany, fit comfortably alongside works by J.S. Bach, Igor Stravinsky, and Paul Hindemith when it was released in 2001 on the Edel Classics label, Biographies, continued while his 2004 chamber piece Demütig Bitten, commissioned by Germany’s Windsbacher Knabenchor, was released on the Rondeau label along with works by Giovanni Gabrieli, Josquin des Prez, and J.S. Bach (again). In 2002 his IAJE Gil Evans Fellowship Commission piece, A Blessing, featuring Bleckmann’s stunning vocals, was performed to critical acclaim at the IAJE Conference, and in 2003 his IAJE/ASCAP commission Folkmoot was premiered in Toronto, Canada.

In 2009 Hollenbeck compiled several recordings of his chamber pieces on the CD Rainbow Jimmies, made possible by his 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship. The disc includes commissions by Bang on a Can and the People’s Commissioning Fund, Ethos Percussion Group funded by the Jerome Foundation, Youngstown State University, and a piece written for the Claudia Quintet’s cross-cultural educational journey to Istanbul, commissioned by the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. Hollenbeck’s other notable works include commissions by Melbourne Jazz Festival; Edinburgh Jazz Festival; University of the Arts, Philadelphia; and Ensemble Cairn, Paris, France.

Hollenbeck received degrees in percussion and jazz composition from the Eastman School of Music before moving to New York City in the early 1990s. He was profoundly shaped by the mentorship of two hugely influential artists: trombonist/arranger/composer Brookmeyer and composer/choreographer . His relationship with Brookmeyer reached back to the age of 14, when he attended the SUNY Binghamton Summer Jazz Workshop, and continued at Eastman, through NEA-funded composition study, and finally on the bandstand with Brookmeyer’s New Art Orchestra and in the studio with Brookmeyer and trumpet great Kenny Wheeler. For Monk, Hollenbeck composed and performed the percussion scores for five of her works:Magic Frequencies, Mercy, The Impermanence Project, Songs of Ascension, and On Behalf of Nature. Hollenbeck’s awards and honors include five Grammy nominations; the 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the 2010 ASCAP Jazz Vanguard Award, and a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship; winning the Jazz Composers Alliance Composition Contest in 1995 and 2002; Meet the Composer’s Grants in 1995 and 2001; and a Rising Star Arranger win in the 2012 and 2013 DownBeat Critics’ Polls, as well as in 2011 for the JHLE as Rising Star Big Band. Hollenbeck was a professor of jazz drums and improvisation at the Jazz Institute Berlin from 2005-2016 and in 2015 joined the faculty of McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. For more information, please visit johnhollenbeck.com. Biographies, continued A short history on why John Hollenbeck writes large ensemble music

My first real career goal was to be the drummer in Woody Herman’s big band. I actually got a short taste of this in 1982 at the age of 14, when Woody’s band did a weeklong summer workshop at SUNY Binghamton. During the final student concert, I got to play Woody’s theme song, Blue Flame with Woody. One year later Al Hamme (our local jazz guru) brought Bob Brookmeyer for the same workshop, and I heard some of Bob’s music for the first time, like Hello and Goodbye, which I still distinctly remember all these years later. Bob’s music resonated strongly with me and felt close to my heart and spirit.

Around that same time, Maynard Ferguson’s band used to roar into town about once a year, an incredibly powerful experience for a young lad like myself, plus I was hearing my brother Pat Hollenbeck’s Medium Rare Big Band of the New England Conservatory. Pat started this band as a student and then continued to lead it as a faculty member. Because of his arranging style and eclectic taste, that band played a little bit of everything. This band had such an impressive range of emotion and texture that as a listener, and then later as a composer, I discovered I naturally reside in this sort of wide-open realm, where anything is possible.

I grew up with some great musicians in Binghamton, New York, and a great many of them later became professional musicians: Dena DeRose, Tony Kadleck, Steve Davis, Tom Dempsey, and Kris Jensen, to name a few. Some of that crew started getting together over the weekends in junior high to play our school big band music, which gave me the idea that I could one day play in a professional big band. With my brother’s encouragement and record collection, I also caught the writing bug and started to think about and compose (very naively at first!) for big band. I continued to play in big bands throughout high school, college, and into my early years in New York City, and also continued with my attempts at composition. I got to be known in some circles as a “big band drummer.” The major part of this experience was my time as the drummer for Bob Brookmeyer’s New Art Orchestra.

In a real sense, I had met my goal of becoming a drummer in an important big band, yet I was not fully satisfied with just being the drummer. It has always been natural for me to ask, “what if?,” so that after playing a good amount of big band music, I started to really think about what was not being composed for this kind of band. The music of my brother, Bob Brookmeyer, and Muhal Richard Abrams, and especially a lecture Muhal gave at a Banff Summer Jazz Workshop, all gave me the courage to write for this range of instruments but without the conventions of a big band. I began to approach this range of instruments more as a wind ensemble or large ensemble and sought ways of answering the question, “what if?” I never had a problem letting go of the traditional “big band” because I want my music to resonate as is, free of genre and tradition. This is what I like to hear—something new and different, maybe not revolutionary, but definitely something I have not heard before. I do truly love the big band and jazz tradition, but ever since I heard my first jazz record, I defined “jazz” as the unknown, the mysterious or intangible. And that is the music that I naturally try to write—music that may not have familiar or tangible posts to hold on to; music that may sometimes be strange at first listen; but music that, I hope, when approached with an open heart and mind, may in some way elevate the listener’s spirit and bring some goodness to this world.

—John Hollenbeck Engagement Events Wednesday, February 6, 2019 CLASS VISIT: MUSIC COMPOSITION While visiting Virginia Tech, John Hollenbeck led a class in the School of Performing Arts for music composition students, hosted by Charles Nichols, assistant professor of composition and creative technologies.

Special thanks to Jason Crafton and Charles Nichols

Go Beyond In his review of John Hollenbeck, DownBeat’s Frank Alkyer writes, “[t]here are those who can play an instrument, and then there are artists like Hollenbeck for whom the orchestra is the instrument.” What do you think Alkyer means by this? How was this evident in Hollenbeck’s compositions and arrangements, as well as the Large Ensemble’s performance? In the Galleries ARBOREAL Thursday, January 24-Saturday, March 23, 2019 All galleries Majestic, sustaining, enduring, but increasingly vulnerable—these words only begin to describe one of Earth’s most critical life forms: trees. This stunning selection of works by artists from Australia, Spain, Israel, Japan, and the United States explores the imagery of trees and their symbolic resonance. Arboreal features photography, video, painting, works on paper, and ceramic, wood, and stainless steel sculpture.

JOIN US! GALLERY TALKS Micro to Macro—All About Trees Join us for a series of gallery talks presented by Virginia Tech faculty that explores a broad variety of topics relating to the world of trees, from sustainability and conservation to dendrochronology and invasive species. Each talk is approximately 30 minutes each and is free and open to the public. Talks will be held in the Ruth C. Horton Gallery.

Saturday, February 16, 2019, 5:30 PM Art Through the Eyes of an Arborist: Eric Wiseman, Ph.D. Wednesday, March 6, 2019, 6:30 PM Charismatic Trees: Lynn Resler Tuesday, March 19, 2019, 6:30 PM Invasive Species—Trees as Victim and Victor: Jacob Barney, Ph.D.

GALLERY HOURS Monday-Friday, 10 AM-5:30 PM Saturday, 10 AM-4 PM

To arrange a group tour or class visit, please contact Meggin Hicklin, exhibitions program manager, at megh79@ vt.edu.