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The Composers and Arrangers |
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over four 78 r.p.m. sides, in a precedent-setting circumvention of the phonograph record's restrictions before the advent of the LP).
Some of the best arrangements written during the final years of the swing craze were accomplished within the narrow, confining framework of one trumpet, alto sax, clarinet, piano, bass and drums. The arranger was Charlie Shavers and the John Kirby band his medium. Shavers' voicing of the three horns, the variety of tonal textures and orchestral ideas he was able to extract from this unit (in which his own trumpet, usually muted, was the principal voice) lent a new dimension to small-combo arranging.
With the close of the swing era came the advent of a new crop of arrangers, all of whom made new and important contributions without departing radically from established patterns. Billy Stray-horn, with the Ellington band from 1939, had absorbed the Ellington techniques with a sensitivity that transcended the merely photographic; to them he added, in some of his mood pieces (Chelsea Bridge) a harmonic flavor that recalled Ravel. As short in stature and broad in scope as Strayhom, young Ralph Burns was to the Woody Herman band from 1944 what Billy was to the Duke. Around the same time, Dizzy Gillespie was translating the new language of bop into terms of both big band orchestration and simple unison quintet arrangement, while Neal Hefti, also writing for the Herman band, was among the £ist to bring bop's innovations downtown from Mintons.
As the war decade progressed, a new school of jazz writers emerged, and for the first time it became abundantly evident that the jazz arranger of the new generation would be a man of considerable training, with a reservoir of knowledge extending deep into the older and newer classical forms. Pete Rugolo, who had studied with Darius MOhaud, applied such a background to his scores for the Kenton band from 1945; two years later John Lewis, a former music student at the University of New Mexico, wrote Toccata for Trumpet and Orchestra, premiered by the Gillespie band at Carnegie Hall. Bill Russo, who had studied with Lennie Tristano and reinforced his knowledge with extensive research into music literature, began to apply his extra-jazz ideas to an experimental group in Chicago and joined the Kenton staff in |
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