Say "big band," and most people, fairly or not, think of the oatmeal sounds of Glenn Miller wafting out over the nursing home cafeteria P.A. But David Sanford's Pittsburgh Collective proves that the big band need not be relegated to the pre-rock past nor doomed to providing sonic wallpaper for Rotary Club luncheons.
When the Collective hit the stage at the Iron Horse in 2005, blasts of dissonant brass rattled the joint. It was a scene—a very loud scene—of metropolitan cool, complete with jagged harmonies and grooving rhythms. And, oddest of all, up front, like a cultural ambassador from the local symphony, sat former Valley resident Matt Haimovitz, bowing his cello like a man possessed.
The album that resulted from that three-date tour, Live at the Knitting Factory, is a compelling collection of pieces incorporating everything from old-school Ellington cool to dramatic, nerve-jangling modernism. At times, the cello hardly changes the big band feel, but at other points, it becomes the central element, cutting a heady blur between the busy percussion section and big horn hits.
David Sanford writes music that is deeply appealing and sophisticated, but his sensibilities are not for those who think "alternative" means listening to The River—his harmonic sensibilities result in big chords and unexpected melodic moves that stray into the farther corners of 20th century music. But things don't fall apart; the center holds. Moments of overload are often followed by pleasant interludes in more familiar territory, but Sanford cannot be dubbed predictable.
The Mount Holyoke professor spends a lot of his time in the classical music world, and has been commissioned to write pieces for Baroque duos and chamber ensembles as well as big bands. His pieces teaming Haimovitz and big band clearly have a foot in jazz and classical, providing a remarkably wide range of sonic possibilities. When Haimovitz and the Pittsburgh Collective hit the Chapin Auditorium stage this week, it's safe to expect that even that large space will be filled to capacity with soundwaves, and listeners will experience the kind of live fireworks that create something more akin to an event than a concert.
The Collective's show will prove to be a particularly Valley-flavored experience, at that. In addition to the two top-billed names, the band includes several current or former Valley musicians. Ted Levine plays alto sax; Genevieve Rose plays bass; Theo Moore plays drums; Geoff Vidal plays sax; and Jeff Messbauer plays trombone.
In a recent interview, Sanford discussed his composing for the Pittsburgh Collective, which is named for his hometown.
Advocate: When did the Pittsburgh Collective start?
David Sanford: We had our first performance in 2003. … I've been wanting to do a big band since I was in high school, even junior high.
How did you incorporate something as mellow as cello with the bigger, brassy sounds of a big band?
It's funny—I don't hear the cello as that mellow of an instrument. It depends, I suppose, on how you use it. One of the earliest examples I think of is a Chuck Mangione piece, of all people, called "El Gato Triste" that I heard years ago. It's this gorgeous, singing melody like Mangione would write. Somehow in the intervening years, once I started studying composition, you realize there's all these very sort of brutal, intense cello pieces in the 20th century: "Spirals" by Chinary Ung, or Elliott Carter's "Sonata," the ways it's played in a lot of piano trios and string quartets. I think I'd written a lot of cello pieces with this more edgy, biting sound, a lot of sul ponticello. Matt can play that way as well. I think some purists would say that his Bach is very intense, depending on which one he plays. … It's a sound I like to work with. Obviously the volume, too, is a hard thing to reconcile. I'd love to have the cello unmiked, unamped. It's something I've wrestled with for a long time. … Logistically there's just no way around it.
Clearly, you're not composing big band music in the mold of Swing Era hits.
There's a lot of different things going into that—definitely studying modern music. Since I first heard Stravinsky—that would have been late junior high school—I think I've been drawn more and more to that side of things. I was a big R&B fan up until disco, and then I kind of stopped. That was my upbringing. It was all I ever heard on the radio, and so I fell in love with that stuff. I was a huge drum and bugle corps fan in high school. Big walls of sound and overactive percussion sections and so forth. My first experiences with big bands were playing in jazz bands in junior high, and I knew Basie a little bit, which I liked, but Ellington I hadn't heard really until well into my high school years. … I liked these modern big bands that were really a lot less popular, but would occasionally do rock and roll tunes, some better than others.
Do you have to think much about audience, or do you feel freed of those concerns as a composer?
That's a tough one. I think I've generally been writing music that I assume people would like. Now, you find people who say it's too loud or it's too edgy, depending on the reviewer. You go into a room of composers, and they'll say it's pleasant enough. And you go into a room of people who listen to other kinds of music and they'll say, "Wow, that was atonal." One reviewer said this piece was atonal—I thought, "Well, I hear clear tones all the way through!" I generally think that people would enjoy it if they don't come with the expectation that they're going to hear the Glenn Miller, Ellington hits. I've definitely had people in their 60s, 70s and 80s who've liked it and younger people who've liked it. It's coming along, but I'm not expecting it to be on the level of the Marsalises as far as those who sell massive amounts of tickets and have that kind of adulation.
I think it's definitely, I'm not going to say an acquired taste, but I've always seen my likes in music as being kind of part of the subculture or the alternative. In pop music, I've always been amazed when I would go to concerts and see people like Radiohead, who I liked, or Primus, who I used to like, selling out concerts or being in the Top 40. There'll be that oddity [when] people will sort of look past their own taste and say, hey, that's nothing like I like—but I like it.
What's the composing process like for you?
I think it's different on each piece. There's a piece, "Bagatelle," on [Live At The Knitting Factory] where I just started out writing a melody. … I come up with the tune, I sit at the piano and work out this and that melody, and what kind of a bridge and the form, those kinds of things, I think in the same way that people have always written songs. In fact, I read something recently where somebody said it's not a real song unless you can play it on acoustic guitar. I think there are pieces like that. "Alchemy" was sort of written that way—I came up with a melody and then changes and went from there with variations and so forth, which is how I think a lot of big band arrangers work.
Other things kind of spin out, like "Link Chapel." I orchestrated that more; it was a combination of various things. I saw that almost like painterly. It's dedicated to my friend Stan Link. There's a piece of his called "were"—in lower case, being Stan—which is this great thing about negation. It's an electronic music piece. So actually in the middle of ["Link Chapel"] I'm trying to imitate that sound and I end up structuring it using this mathematical [form]. I will be the first to say I'm not sure anyone hears these things in music, because time can't be seen all at once, the way you can with paintings and architecture and say, "Oh, it's this long, so that must be the middle"—but I did it anyway, because I could and it was a way of getting from A to B. I worked it out such that it was in itself sort of its own chapel. In that way, it ends up sounding completely different. There's a little melody at the beginning that comes back very disguised such that you never hear it, and there's a little trumpet melody in the middle, but it's more sort of soundmass moving.
Are you often looking for unusual ways like that to get from A to B?
I think so. The way that the piece comes out will sort of suggest itself. Invariably, I have one great aspect of it that I'm really drawn to, and then I build things around it. The piece "V-Reel" I started thinking about 20 years ago, actually at a bar, and I knew somewhere along the line that at the end there was going to be this wall of [sound]. I don't know if you know Stan Kenton's City of Glass that Bob Graettinger wrote in the '50s?—I always loved that album, and I thought it would be great if you put something really monstrous thundering beneath it.
So I was after that sound and I said, "Okay, well, I've got to build up to that, I can't just do that." I'm not a minimalist. I know a lot of people are now, and it's a very popular thing among certain composers. But I just don't think that way, which I guess makes me an anchronism or out of fashion. I feel like I have to earn that, get to that and then stay there, but I won't keep it there. In that respect, I suppose I do think about audiences. Part of me that likes minimalism likes just sitting there, back in the days of LPs taking the tone arm and going over that same two bars over and over again, and loving it. I'm enjoying it, but nobody else might be.
Is every note planned, or is improvisation a part of the Collective's approach?
Little bits of improvisation. Most of what you're hearing is fully composed. The rhythm section, in a lot of cases, I leave alone. I'll give a suggested beat, and invariably, my beats are never as interesting as what a good drummer will come up with—mine are probably the standard fare. Maybe if I had the system like rappers and producers and techno guys do to come up with new beats, I might.
Piano, bass, guitar—a lot of times I leave those open. Like in "Scherzo Grosso," those parts are, more often than not, completely written out. There are sections of improv like you have in a big band. I tend to like to add those—it gives you almost a mental breather, but I also kind of like that aspect, that you do let go at some point. I'm probably more of a fascist than a jazz composer should be, as far as control of materials. I've generally found that, particularly with the rhythm section, they sound better when I just let them go. We have so many soloists; if there's a real criminal problem, and it's true with most big bands, it's that I don't let them loose enough.
What else are you working on now?
There's a Baroque piece for Duo d'amore, and I'm also working on a concerto with the big band. Our piano player is just a monstrous classical player and I've been wanting to do this for several years. It's a cello and big band concerto. There's a new group out of New York, Speculum Musicae. I'm going to do a concerto grosso with them, fitting in the big band, which will probably be more hairy than anything else I've done. I'm not sure, but I don't think I would play that in Chapin! Maybe in a library somewhere.
You've been quoted as saying composing is a struggle for you. Is that still true?
Yes and no. It doesn't mean I don't like to do it. I wouldn't pretend to know [philosopher Theodor] Adorno very well, but that aspect of being able to do something by negating all the other avenues to get to that one is probably true for me. I'm generally critical of my first ideas, and I have to live with them for a long time to like them. For example the piece "Fenwick" that we've been doing for a long time—the riff took me forever to come up with. I knew I wanted something like what Sting did with—boy, I shouldn't bring that name up!—that Dream of the Blue Turtles band version of "Shadows in the Rain." I knew I wanted some shuffle beat like that, and a riff that would go with what I had melodically. I knew it was going to center on G, and be kind of bluesy, and I just wrestled forever with that. Thankfully I was on sabbatical and I had time to do this—I would walk for days and just run through little riffs in my head. After about five days I was like, "I've got it. This is perfect." After reeling out everything else that could have possibly happened.
I generally feel most comfortable with a piece when I can do that. The ones I just sort of do on the cuff—"Una Notte all'Opera," which, actually, I did in a week—actually, that came out very easily. And I have to say, I don't dislike anything about it. I've always wanted to do a Franz Kline-type piece where I just threw notes on a paper in a big gestural way, but the last time I tried that, it took me an hour to come up with half a beat!?
David Sanford and the Pittsburgh Collective featuring Matt Haimovitz perform Thursday, Oct. 25, $10-50, 7:30 p.m., Chapin Auditorium, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, (413) 545-2511, (800) 999-UMASS or wfcr.org.
