Durable as ebony

By now you know the Ebony Band played its last concerts in May, and why. After 17 years, founder/director Werner Herbers pulled the plug on this linchpin Dutch ensemble, after the Raad voor Cultuur’s gave a negative assessment of (and no money for) a proposed retrospective phase: a breather period to let the band explore its considerable repertoire, rather than scoping out new material.

Hey, we all see how it’s gone in the western world: arts funding is way down everywhere, and someone’s got to take the hit. (Even in North America, writers have ceased mentioning Holland’s once much-vaunted and much envied “subsidy system.”)

Normally I’m all for fresh discoveries, but the decision to cut off Ebony’s funding seems mistaken to me, as the group epitomizes a particular aspect of Dutch music-making: the reflex to smudge genre divisions. In the classical realm, Ebony is known for performing Schulhoff and Wolpe and other overlooked mid-20th century composers; Herbers championed music from between the World Wars.

But of course Ebony made a minor specialty of playing post-WWII music by big-band arrangers, many employed by Stan Kenton: Pete Rugolo, George Handy, Johnny Carisi, Jimmy Giuffre, Bill Russo, and most especially Bob—now upgraded to Robert F.—Graettinger. That reclusive, eccentric Los Angeles composer worked for years on his three-movement magnum opus City of Glass, meant to capture the modern urb in all its multi-faceted bustle. Kenton recorded it in 1953; Ebony revived it in the 1990s, recording it twice for Channel Classics: once conducted by Boston’s Gunther Schuller, and then again in 1996, at Amsterdam’s Paradiso (Holland Festival) and Frascati (Klap op de Vuurpijl) under Herbers’ direction.

I’d caught that program live, and finally hearing the CD Graettinger Live at the Paradiso—with City of Glass, some chamber works, and arrangements of standards for big band—confirms my memory: for a unit that got its start drafting players from the Concertgebouw Orkest (where Herbers is principal oboist), Ebony Band got jazz inflections amazingly right: the brass punches have real power, the saxophone backgrounds expertly swell and ebb, with finely shaded dynamics, and the rhythm section has supple, swinging strength. (That last aspect improved over time, as Herbers tapped more jazz musicians for these pieces: rhythm players here include pianist Marc van Roon, and key swingers Ernst Glerum and Martin van Duynhoven). Oddly enough the only performer who sounds a bit at sea is the great Claron McFadden, who swings the standards no more than your average opera singer.

Not that Ebony was locked in the past. On the 1997 program “Dada toen & nu” showcasing vocal acrobat Jaap Blonk, they mixed Rudolph Blümner’s 1920s sound poetry and pre-postmodern George Antheil with more recent absurdities by Misha Mengelberg and David Dramm. Ebony collaborated with the trio Janssen Glerum Janssen for 1996’s genre-mixing Grenverleggers concerts (am I the only one who remembers those?), and subsequently recorded two of Guus Janssen’s compositions for his Composers Voice CDs: Passevite, derived from a pet Lennie Tristano chord sequence, with whispers of Tristano’s subdued but springy swing; and Klotz for violin, hi-hat and ensemble, derived from Janssen’s own jazz trio work. Again, the players get the right pulsing rhythm feel—and if you’ve ever heard American symphony musicians try to phrase in swingtime, you know that’s no small thing.

Even with its Gunther Schuller connection, Ebony Band never got stamped as “third stream”—the term Schuller had coined to describe a new music organically combining elements of classical and vernacular musics (like jazz). As far as I know, that term never took root in Holland, which is curious given how such blends fascinate Dutch composers (and ensembles). If any band fit the third-stream bill, it was this one. And like other ensembles that present contemporary and recent music, Ebony has played plenty of pieces only once or twice they might profitably revive, so Herber’s bid for a retrospective phase makes sense to me. A program of works by Giuffre, Russo, George Russell, Mengelberg and Janssen, and such diverse jazz-related composers as Hanns Eisler (see Charlie Haden), Conlon Nancarrow (whose piano rolls are higher-math boogie-woogie) and Kurt Weill—now that would have made for a nice evening out.