Twisting Trails of Career: Reggie Nicholson Brass Concept

The jazz world is built on the backs of musicians we used to call “journeymen”, artists who have learned their craft, paid their dues, and perfected their skills playing modest gigs of many types. They are the backbone of this music. The drummer and composer Reggie Nicholson, who led a wonderful quintet this past Saturday, is one such musician. His Brass Concept: James Zollar, trumpet, Marshall Sealy, French horn, Steve Swell, trombone, and Joseph Daley, tuba, shared an hour of meaty, alt-kilter music with a lucky few at the Community Music School of Springfield on October 15.

“Journeyman” is a dated (and gender-bound) term of faint praise. But I think of those freelancers and side persons, many of them drummers and bassists, as the connective tissue of the music, circulating stories and innovations from band to band.

Nicholson is a long-time member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Black-centered Chicago institution formed in the 1960s, brilliantly documented by George Lewis in “A Power Stronger Than Itself”. He has performed with AACM luminaries like Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton and Amina Claudine Myers, and anchored bands led by Myra Melford, Leroy Jenkins, Fay Victor and Oliver Lake. He is the epitome of the talented, unsung musician who makes everyone around him sound better. It’s always cause for celebration when someone who has so ably served others is spotlighted.

Nicholson has absorbed a founding principle of the AACM: to compose and perform original music that expands the tradition. His mastery of other instruments (he played marimba on Saturday) and his embrace of interesting organizing principles (he also leads his Percussion Concept), are in keeping with AACM precepts.

Brass ensembles have a long history in European classical music, and are frequently employed in sacred and patriotic settings. Nicholson brings a risk-taking attitude to the genre, creating stimulating soundscapes that are both mellifluous and knotty. The sound was rarely loud, never brash, and often beautifully rounded, but filled with complicated counterpoint and dense chords. Most of the material was drawn from his 2009 recording, Surreal Feel, which featured Zollar and Daley. Eschewing swing convention and easy hooks, the music was highly composed, but left sections where one, two or three voices improvised. On pieces like “Celestials”, “Surreal Feel” and “Local Express”, I heard compositional echoes of Henry Threadgill, the Pulitzer Prize winning composer who Nicholson worked with in the mid-80s.

Like Nicholson, the brass section are all veterans with decades of varied experience, including as leaders. They read down complicated charts and soloed with style and enthusiasm. Trumpeter James Zollar, proud brother of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder of Urban Bush Women,was featured in Robert Altman’s film “Kansas City” and Madonna’s video “My Baby’s Got a Secret”, and has played in hundreds of settings with Cecil McBee, Don Byron, Marty Ehrlich and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, among others. He seemed to lightly direct his brass brethren through Nicholson’s written thickets, and used multiple mutes to add texture and humor.

Marshall Sealy also used a mute, a rarity for the French horn, given its large bell. His career includes work in show orchestras (Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr., Melba Moore), pit orchestras (Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey, Broadway productions of Lion King, Beauty & the Beast) and TV orchestras (Emmy and Grammy Awards). He has performed with Max Roach, Steve Coleman, Lester Bowie and Ray Charles, taught at Berklee College of Music and was the Director of Music at the Harlem School of the Arts.

Steve Swell is an old friend who produced a memorable Jazz Shares concert in Northampton with his Kende Dreams on March 13, 2020, just as the curtain closed on live performance. Other notable Valley Swell-sightings include a 2016 concert at Hampshire College, and big band work under Magic Triangle auspices with William Parker’s Little Huey Orchestra, Jemeel Moondoc’s Jus’ Grew Orchestra and Alan Silva’s Celestrial Communication Orchestra. His five minute unaccompanied solo, full of gutbucket and extended vocabulary, was some of the most bluesy of the evening.

Joe Daley has been a hero of mine since I heard him in Sam Rivers’ great small groups of the 1970s. His large ensemble releases of the last decade: The Seven Deadly Sins, The Seven Heavenly Virtues and Portraits: Wind, Thunder and Love, are towering achievements, which he hopes to tour in celebration of his 75th birthday in 2024. His playing added plenty of bottom, but I wish Nicholson had made room for him to rip some groove at some point.

There are musicians who, like basketball players who set picks, take charges and box out, do the little things that ensures the success of the group. But that selflessness can sometimes obscure other talents and higher ambitions. Reggie Nicholson and the other members of his Brass Concept are artists like that, first call sidemen with their own projects that teem with creativity.

The Never-Ending Now: Jeff Cosgrove Quartet Creates Music in Springfield

Sometimes in the world of improvised music, it’s not necessary to have long history to establish a rapport. The connection can be immediate if the musicians involved are accomplished, think-on your-feet veterans. Drummer Jeff Cosgrove had never met pianist Angelica Sanchez before they performed together on Friday at the Community Music School of Springfield, and Sanchez had never played with multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson, either. Despite that lack of shared experience, the music produced on September 30 by the Jeff Cosgrove Quartet was cohesive, magical and very musical.

I also had never met Cosgrove before Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares agreed to host his band; indeed, I’d hardly heard of him. But when he mentioned the personnel: Angelica Sanchez, Scott Robinson and bassist Ken Filiano, my wheels of excitation whirled. The affable Filiano was the lynchpin, both relationally and musically. He knew everyone in the band, and provided the connective tissue that gave the evening it’s shape and coherence.

The concert centered around five Cosgrove compositions, loosely woven together without fanfare or interruption. The sketched pieces sat inside a sea of instant composition, with four master musicians listening and responding deeply in real time. The results: open and abstract, but with clear contours and moods, carried this participant to a place of acceptance and engagement.

Cosgrove was an unassuming bandleader, content to provide color and texture. His brief solos, sometimes with hands on skins, were understated and played at moderate volume. He skirted all the stereotypes: there was no bashing, no impossible tempos, no strict timekeeping, no overt displays of virtuosity. Instead, he added his voice to the others, moving the proceedings along without attracting undue attention. As a consequence, the band sounded as one.

Cosgrove lives in rural Maryland, and before that, in West Virginia, far from any critical mass of jazz energy. Although his profile might be low, his discography as a leader, featuring musicians like Frank Kimbrough, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Mat Maneri, Scott Robinson and Ken Filiano, is very impressive. His latest, History Gets Ahead of the Story, is a trio with John Medeski and Jeff Lederer. He is starting “Jazz Inside Out”, a series of concerts in Frederick, MD that will put him the company of Dave Douglas, Caroline Davis, Akua Dixon and John Hébert. He has created his own scene, on his own terms. If you want to know more about Cosgrove, check out this interview which appeared in my favorite on-line jazz publication, Point of Departure.

This was my first opportunity to spend time with Scott Robinson, who was an overnight guest at chez Page/Siegel. We stayed up past 2am, talking about his “lab” in Teaneck, NJ, where he records, rehearses and repairs instruments. He owns hundreds of reed, brass and percussion instruments (20 tubas, he told me), which he reconditions and sometimes sells. Many of them are rare, obsolete or custom made. He is recording an improvised symphony comprised of him playing his musical ephemera, and is half-way through the first of four movements; he estimates it will take him 20 years to complete. The culmination of his 2015 residency at The Stone was his Orchestra Impossible, featuring well known New York musicians playing his assortment of obscure, rarely heard instruments. The day after the Jazz Shares concert, at Robinson’s behest, we visited some Northampton antique shops in search of old sound making devices. In Springfield, Robinson played a C melody saxophone, a tárogató(a Hungarian woodwind), and a cornet made in Springfield, Massachusetts by the John Heald Company in 1902 or 1903.

Robinson’s playing was magnificent, with complete control over all three horns. He used various extended techniques judiciously and conversationally, and always in service to the music. I liked the way he changed the dynamics of each section by moving closer or further from the microphone. At one point, he moved off-stage and played a drum, a bell and crash cymbals.

Sanchez has so much playing experience, I imagine she had no trepidation playing this new music with these new people. She just started a full time teaching job at Bard College, so she has lots of new in her life. Everything she played had an element of the unexpected, free from cliché, and delivered with confidence. She has become a real friend, and I look forward to seeing her next on October 30 at Real Art Ways in Hartford, with Terry Jenoure’s ensemble.

What a happy coming together of old and new companions, making live music for the benefit of us all.

A Large Helping of Sound: David Sanford Big Band in Florence

It goes without saying, that organizing a concert for big band is a heavy lift. You don’t just pick up a saxophone, gather a few friends and blow. The logistics, not to mention the finances, are daunting. So if you are a composer and arranger in the 21st century, and your “instrument” is an aggregation of 20, your gigs are few and far between. Such is the fate of David Sanford, a lauded, but under recognized master of the large ensemble, who gave a life-changing concert at the Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity on Sunday. The event was part of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares’ 11th season.

David Sanford, the Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Music at Mt. Holyoke College, was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. But mention his name to the average jazz fan and you’re likely to get a blank stare. You will search in vain for Sanford’s name among the big bands in the Downbeat critic’s poll. But for my money, Sanford writes and arranges circles around better known ensembles led by Maria Schneider, Wynton Marsalis or Christian McBride. It has everything to do with exposure, of course. Sanford doesn’t have the resources of Jazz at Lincoln Center or the juggernaut that is the Maria Schneider Orchestra. Hopefully, the well-received release last year of A Prayer for Lester Bowie (Greenleaf), will help to elevate Sanford’s standing among big band royalty.

But on September 11, in sleepy Florence, Massachusetts, 180 of us heard an extraordinary mass of sound organized in extremely creative ways by the David Sanford Big Band. Drawing from jazz, rock, blues, funk and experimental music, Sanford’s writing had us leaning in with our ears pinned back.

In April at UMass, I presented Adam Rudolph’s GO: Organic Orchestra with Brooklyn Raga Massive. Rudolph’s 30-person ensemble emphasized strings, percussion and flutes, and floated through Bowker Auditorium on a world-music vibe. Sanford’s outfit was more like some hip, roaring Stan Kenton band: five trumpets, five low brass (trombones and tuba), five saxophones and rhythm section.

The energy tunes, including “poppit” and “Full Immersion”, brought us face to face with a powerful machine firing on all cylinders. The room was ablaze. On the latter tune, simultaneous tenor saxophone solos by Anna Webber and Lee Odom brought the house down.

There were lots of friends, family, colleagues and students of Sanford’s in the audience, who offered yelps of delight, dialogue, applause and laughter throughout the evening. “We love you, David”, rung through the sanctuary. In fact, it was a love fest all around. Sanford has long time relationships with many of the people in his band, about half who are original members from 2003. Some are among his oldest and closest friends. Others, like tubist Joe Exley, was a last minute COVID-related replacement. Lee Odom, who Sanford first heard playing at Ornette Coleman’s memorial, and Anna Webber, now living in Franklin county, are both more recent collaborators. Towards the end of the evening, Sanford introduced the members of the band with descriptions of his personal connection to each.

Then there is Hugh Ragin. The veteran trumpet player was a mentor of Sanford’s from his time in Colorado, and remains a valued collaborator. Sanford was deferential throughout the evening, happy to have his teacher on the bandstand. The 71 year old trumpeter led the band in his original, “The Moors of Spain”. Its catchy, loping melody was the most straight ahead piece on the program, and a perfect respite to the density of many of Sanford’s compositions. Ragin, who has extensive performing credits with Roscoe Mitchell and David Murray, was a dynamic soloist throughout.

There were other outstanding soloists, including trombonist Jim Messbauer and alto saxophonist Ted Levine. But the real star was the band itself, who executed Sanford’s vision as one precise and supple unit. They performed the night before in New York as part of the Festival of New Trumpet (FONT). If they sounded this good after one rehearsal and one concert, imagine if they were criss-crossing the country like the big bands of yesteryear, bringing the joy to towns large and small.