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Gerald Wilson: Little Big Man [Stereophile]

Big bands died out back in the 1950s, right? They went away when the jitterbug faded and folks began dancing to music other than swing? And then real jazz fans departed when the bebop soloists came along and made big-band players look clumsy and quaint?

Despite that widely accepted tale, the big band never quite went away. Since the war years, the big bands' indisputably wide palette of instrumental colors and voicings has become an irresistible lure to composers, players, and arrangers as varied as Sun Ra, Gil Evans, and Fela Kuti. One constant voice in the world of big bands is that of Gerald Wilson, a writer, arranger, and bandleader who's been involved with big bands since the 1940s, and has worked with everyone from Jimmie Lunceford to Ray Charles—and who, in a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles, said that big bands are "my life."

Teamed with the sympathetic ears of producer Al Pryor, Wilson has now made five big-band albums for Detroit-based Mack Avenue Records, one of a handful of independent labels that today carry on the proud jazz tradition of feisty indies unafraid to take chances. This past summer Mack released not one but two big-band records: Wilson's Legacy, and bassist Christian McBride's The Good Feeling. Add to these Randy Brecker's The Jazz Ballad Songbook (Half Note Records), featuring the Danish Radio Big Band, and Nights on Earth (Horizontal), the latest from multi-Grammy-winning big-band composer-arranger Vince Mendoza, and there seems to be a mini-revival of the big band in full, er, swing.

"The fact that we're doing two big-band records—both are a function of our relationship to the artist, as opposed to some kind of unique commitment to large ensembles," Pryor says. "A big band is like an orchestra, it's an instrument, and when you have the desire and ability to write and arrange for it, you want to exercise those muscles, and that's what we're seeing. Guys like Christian McBride, Vince Mendoza, and Gerald Wilson, they're interested in voicings, in how sections sound. You could argue that what you are listening to with a big band is multiple chamber groups coming together and coming apart. There are multiple narratives that can happen.

While a handful of survivors from the glory era of the big bands are still working, few of them have remained players—in the twin senses of mastering an instrument and being a savvy force on the scene—as Gerald Wilson has. Now 93, he's one of the few peers of Duke Ellington still alive who can tell first-person stories about the great jazz maestro...

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