Jazz ensemble tips its hat to the legends
Acclaimed trumpeter Jon Faddis dedicates his concert "Happy 90th Birthday, Nat, Diz, Ella and Monk" to some of jazz’s most influential artists.
by Bob Karlovits
Jon Faddis approaches the varied sides of his musical life with the same force he uses in ripping out a trumpet solo in a manner mindful of Dizzy Gillespie.
He teaches at two music schools, is affiliated with a range of music-related groups, leads small groups and two big bands and still finds ways to work in other projects.
"I'm a little busy," he admits, talking two days after returning from a one-day performance in Australia. "But I'll take that."
He hits the road again this week for a weekend stay in the North Side, where he will lead his Chicago Jazz Ensemble, a band affiliated with Columbia College Chicago but made of professional musicians.
It's a band that not only gives him a chance to show his remarkably powerful chops in a number of ways, but creates an educational-artistic exploration of music.
This concert, "Happy 90th Birthday, Nat, Diz, Ella and Monk," will take a look at music that was created or played by some of the best-known names in jazz. It will include the sounds of singer and pianist Nat "King" Cole, trumpeter Gillespie, singer Ella Fitzgerald and pianist Thelonious Monk, as well as original tunes.
"We'll be starting at the present and just keep working our way back," he says.
Faddis, 54, says the band started about 40 years ago as a way to examine the big-band repertoire and was led by arranger and trombonist Bill Russo (1928-2003). When Russo died, Faddis, a man with a good deal of big-band experience, won auditions to take over.
He likes the educational role of the band, but also is trying to take it in new directions by commissioning original big-band works from arrangers such as Tom Garling and Bob Ojeda.
"It's similar to what I was doing with the Carnegie Hall band," he says, referring to 11 years' leading the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band in New York. In that time, the band premiered more than 100 pieces.
He also is doing that with the Jon Faddis Jazz Orchestra of New York, the successor of the Carnegie Hall band.
Big bands are fitting outlets for players of Faddis' power. After meeting trumpet legend Gillespie when he was 15, he sat in with him at a jazz workshop in San Francisco, near his Oakland home.
He was a member of Lionel Hampton's band by the time he was 17, then joined the fabled Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra in New York. He also has been a member of or performed with the bands of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans, as well as Paquito D'Rivera's United Nation Orchestra and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
He also has worked in many small groups and done a fair amount of soundtrack work, helping to add up to appearances on 500 albums.
He also is a guest lecturer at Columbia College Chicago and director of jazz performance at the State University of New York at Purchase.
One of his projects will lead him to Australia again later this year, he says. But that probably will keep him longer than his recent concert trip.
