Thad Jones/Mel Lewis

And the Jazz Orchestra at Clarenceville High School, Livonia, December 7

Well. the folks out in Clarenceville just can't get enough big band music lo quench their habit. Every year they bring in the like of Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson and any other band that travels in a bus.
A few weeks ago it was "Thad Jones-Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra" who stopped in for a breather on their way home from a tour of Japan.

Now I can't speak for the Japanes,but anybody who's heard Jimmy Wilkins' band is going to find this Thad Jones thing a little cold. Not that the musicians are to blame: Thad and Mel still assemble the best players around and they need to. Thad's charts demand seamless ensemble playing and a great range of color and texture. The problem is that it feels too often like a "showcase" affair - drum solos, dramatic finales, the works

Even Santa Claus can't provide us with enough choruses of Thad Jones' fluegelhorn. Though it was a rarity in this concert, he did stretch out on "Once Around," a tune from their first Solid State LP. Thad is a cliche-free player, even on a tune with time-worn changes.
Cecil Bridgewater showed himself to be a great young trumpeter on the standard "Willow Weep For Me."
And Walter Norris, one of the rare pianists in Ornette Coleman's past, surfaced with some un-Jonesian modalities as he played Roland Hanna's beautiful "Speak Like a Child."
The Jones-Lewis band is tight, but it just doesn't feel like it's been lived in and sweated over. 
The humor, the warmth and the fight are absent. Unorthodox or not, I've got to mention the Wilkins band a second time and champion them as the real thing. Why settle for anything less?

-Davis Weiss