"Featuring many of NYC's top players including Marvin Stamm, Ralph Lalama, Ted Rosenthal, Harvie S, Jay Brandford, Jason Rigby, and Jim Rotondi, the CD showcases the group's exceptional musicianship. As the NY Times says of the group: "Šthe Westchester Jazz Orchestra has built a reputation for deeply researched, strikingly executed performances that is reaching well beyond the orchestra's home county to the country at large. But the ensemble, 17 of the New York area's most in-demand musicians, is not resting on its laurels."
The recording made last month at Bennett Studios, “Maiden Voyage Suite,” will consist of original arrangements of tunes from Mr. Hancock’s 1965 album “Maiden Voyage.” The suite was enthusiastically received twice in concert, though it became a candidate for recording only when the orchestra won a $10,000 grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. The award was announced last June. The recording session, Mr. Holober said, was “definitely overdue.”
The session, a two-day affair, started slowly. The chief engineer, James A. Farber, said he was not used to the studio, a converted railroad terminal. As he worked the controls on the first tune, “Little One,” he initially expressed concern about whether the wiring on all of the horns’ microphones was intact. And as the alto saxophonist Jay Brandford, who had arranged the tune, prepared to listen to the playback, he admitted to a few tense moments of his own.
But the tension quickly drained away as music filled the control room. Lush one moment and highly articulated the next, the horns — especially Mr. Brandford’s alto, which rose in solo above the band — revealed no evidence of lost connections. Mr. Brandford, normally one of the band’s more reticent personalities, smiled broadly, saying “Little One” had never sounded better in the orchestra’s hands."
“Eye of the Hurricane” and the title tune finished off the day in a flurry of mixed meters and complex reharmonizations. On the second day, “Dolphin Dance,” “Survival of the Fittest (Part 1)” and three short pieces of transitional writing were dispatched with relative ease. The need for specific musicians to redo passages was kept to a minimum. And all of the tunes were completed in two takes — save for “Survival of the Fittest (Part 2),” which needed three.
The suite is the work of four writers — Tony Kadleck, Pete McGuinness, Mr. Holober and Mr. Brandford — all of whom are current or former members of the orchestra. Each has a distinctive style. Yet the musicians noted a consistency of voice, largely reflecting the efforts of Mr. Holober, who chose the writers, stayed in touch with them as their work progressed and produced transitions — a prelude, interlude and epilogue — that wove in motivic bits from their arrangements.
“Somehow,” Mr. Stamm said, “the music came out seamless.”
The record is not intended simply as a document of the suite; parallel versions of some tracks have been recorded for airplay. Endings have replaced segues, and the individual tracks have been kept to a length of less than 11 minutes, which Mr. Walker said would fit WBGO’s format. The album, he said, will take its place among the 100 or so new releases from which the station chooses at any one time, and cuts from it might be played three or four times a week.
