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| | liner notes | It’s a play on words, American Gotham, a poke in Grant Woods’ ribs, as are the cover photos parodying Woods’ classic 1930 painting, American Gothic. But I suspect when Woods painted his sister, his dentist and a pitchfork into our collective memory, he may have been doing some rib-poking of his own. Gothic originally meant non-Roman, or non-classical. It was an insult, until what Europeans first derided as a cheap non-style came to represent a classic style all its own. Woods’ claim to an American gothic, complete with overalls and farmer’s daughter, must have felt to snooty fans of Gothic Revivalism like a sharp elbow in the tradition.
American Gotham jabs its elbow, too, at the absurdity that New York City is not really part of America, that it’s a cement-and-steel playground for liberals and pornographers and dandies who know the history of words like gothic. With this CD, with this music, the Gotham Wind Symphony has said, in its best Brooklynese: “We got your Americana right here…”
But this isn’t Sousa under the band gazebo on the town green, anymore than American Gothic is a snapshot of a typical Iowa farm. Mike Christianson, the GWS’s conductor, puts it this way: “This is our Americana—the version where we celebrate New York as the important cultural font it is, the version where we recognize jazz as the great artistic contribution it is (within every wind ensemble is a jazz band—literally).”
There are piles of music written for concert bands, particularly high school bands, but virtually none of it by significant jazz musicians. In fact, Thad Jones’s Northwest Suite, commissioned in 1984 by Mike’s dad Ed Christianson, may have been the first wind band commission of a major figure in jazz. For jazz historians, a large ensemble work by a composer of Jones’s importance will be a find. But by the time Jones wrote it, he’d left New York for Denmark—he was one of the great musicians in US history but he struggled to make a living here. Ed Christianson’s North Dakota high school band students sold pizzas to pay for Northwest Suite. How’s that for Americana? Breathing life again into that soaring piece was one of Mike’s first inspirations for forming the GWS. “I imagined Northwest Suite played by great New York musicians, then imagined what today’s jazz composers might bring to this tradition, given a chance to expand their palette.”
James Chirillo’s Prelude to a Minor Insensitivity is a perfect example, demonstrating both the expanding palette and the furthering of tradition. It began as a piano improvisation on some material from Jobim’s How Insensitive, which itself began with material from Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, which likely began from something else. Chirillo expanded the improvisation (“I wrote it down,” he says). And with encouragement from legendary composer/arranger Bill Finegan (who told Chirillo, “It’s too short”—composers LOVE hearing that), an amusing bit of parlor fun ended up performed by sixty of the best musicians in the world. And a musical idea has been passed along yet again.
Scott Robinson’s Eventuations revives a different tradition, that of wind bands including a second ensemble in the arrangement. In this case it’s the jazz band from New York’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art. “Around the time I was starting on this piece,” he says, “I had been reading about stellar nurseries, the gaseous clouds of tiny particles that give rise to stars and star systems. These tenuous structures are acted upon by a variety of forces from within and without, so that from this nebulous material galaxies are formed, or can be said to ‘eventuate.’ As I wrote, I realized this sort of process was taking effect in the piece. While the orchestra sets forth certain ‘nebulous’ materials, the jazz band appears and exerts powerful forces on that material, which in turn reacts, altering the structure.”
A high school band also figured in the creation of Mike Holober’s Road Trip, commissioned by Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. The road trip Holober pictures is partly real, partly imagined, a tour of places Americans know instinctively. “There is an American quality to the sounds these images inspire,” he says. “It’s been programmed into all of us, mostly by Aaron Copland. All those open fourths and fifths, all that ‘majorness’—it gives me chills. What better medium to let those sentiments run wild than in that most American ensemble of all, the concert band?”
And that leads us back to Americana, to Grant Woods’ dentist glowering at us from 1930’s Iowa. Is he protecting something with that pitchfork? Claiming something? Woods never said, but I think it’s both. Certainly the Gotham Wind Symphony is doing both. It’s protecting our history, preserving our traditional way of making music—groups of people coming together, and with hands and lungs and lips and air, making sounds that can carry us places: to the Northwest, to a barn dance, to a starry night. It’s protecting music that inspires us to re-imagine the music of our predecessors, to grow it into something new. It’s protecting an art that shows us star stuff becoming stars, even as it puts masters next to high schoolers to discover what they might become.
And what is the Gotham Wind Symphony claiming? That jazz, a once derided, now classic American style, is still vibrant, even in a culture of hip-hop and iPods. And that it’s happening here, in Gotham, that most American of places. It’s proving that the American wind band and all it represents—tradition, invention, cooperation, inclusion, mastery, beauty, optimism—is alive and well and kicking ass in New York City.
-Steve Armour
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| | 01 Northwest Suite 1 |  | | 02 Prelude (to a Minor Insensitivity) 1 | | | Eventuations | | | 04 Road Trip-Next Six Miles 1 | | | 05 Road Trip- Swamp Stomp 1 | | | 06 Road Trip- Stars Below 1 | | | 07 Road Trip- Barn Dance 1 | |
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| | personnel | Piccolo/Flute
Brian Miller
Flute
Janet Axelrod-Bailey
Les Scott
Oboe
Lynne Cohen
Oboe/English Horn
Marnie Ingman
Bassoon
Maureen Strenge
Jackie Henderson
Eb Clarinet
Scott Shachter
Clarinet
KeriAnn K. DiBari-Oberle
Ralph Olsen
Martha Hyde
Karen Fisher
Ben Kono
Jack Stuckey
Bass Clarinet
Steve Kenyon
Contra Alto Clarinet
Bohdan Hilash
Soprano/Alto Saxophone
Allen Won
Alto Saxophone
Dave Pietro
Tenor Saxophone
Dan Willis
Tom Christensen
Baritone Saxophone
Richard Kriska
ContrabassSaxophone, Tenor, Clarinet
Scott Robinson
Trumpet
Neil Balm
David Spier
Tony Kadleck
Bud Burridge
Joe Reardon
Horn
Theresa MacDonnell
Leise Anschuetz
Anita Miller
Kathy Canfield Shepard
Trombone
Mark Patterson
Ray Fitzgerald
Bob Suttmann
Bass Trombone
Jeff Nelson
Euphonium
Bruce Eidem
Dick Clark
Tuba
Marcus Rojas
Matt Ingman
Percussion
Kory Grossman
Charles Descarfino
John Meyers
Grisha Alexiev
Tom Christianson
Diana Herold
Paul Pizzuti
Timpani
Tom Christianson
Drum Kit
John Hollenbeck
Acoustic Bass
Dick Sarpola
Piano
Mike Holober
Conductor
Mike Christianson
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