Sunday, January 24, 1999
Blast from the North:
Canada’s Boss Brass blows in for benefit
Byline: Peter B. King, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Section: Arts & Entertainment, Pg. E-3, Music Preview
Length: 1423 words
Taking a big band on the road isn’t easy. Consider the
logistics of getting Rob McConnell and his crack 21-piece
Boss Brass from Toronto to the Carnegie Music Hall Tuesday
to perform a benefit for the Howard Gendell MD Scholarship
Endowment Fund.
“We booked a bus, and we’re going to leave at 11 in the
morning,” McConnell says on the telephone from his home in
Peterborough, Ont., about 70 miles north of Toronto. “And
we’re going to get there, get set up, have dinner, which
has been provided, and we’ll do the concert. And right
after the concert we’re going to get back on the bus and
we’re going to go home to Toronto. Which should get us to
Toronto about 4 a.m. the next day.
“So it’s not going to be a picnic,” he says. “But we’re
looking forward to it very much.”
The difficulty of transporting that many band members — not
to mention making a decent buck among them - explains why
this three-time Grammy- winning big band that boasts
McConnell’s tuneful, surprising and exuberant arrangements,
as well as many of Canada’s best soloists, plays only about
40 dates a year. The band members, including McConnell, all
have other gigs.
The Boss Brass, in other words, has been a 30-year labor of
love. “I’ve never operated on a business level. I’ve
operated on a music level,” McConnell says. “I don’t think
my music level has been a mistake.”
Now 63, McConnell was born in London, Ont., and moved to
Toronto when he was 4. His older brother played trumpet,
and McConnell wanted to also. But his high school had
already given out all the trumpets, so he settled for a
slide trombone. A few years later, McConnell switched to
valve trombone, a “bastard” of an instrument, as he’s
called it, that combines some of the trumpet’s facility
with some of the trombone’s expressiveness. It has few
exponents in jazz — Bob Brookmeyer and the Ellington band’s
Juan Tizol are the most famous.
As a young man, McConnell worked on oil rigs in Alberta and
started playing jazz gigs at night. Returning to Toronto,
he studied with a renowned Toronto arranger/teacher, Gordon
Delamont. Maynard Ferguson took McConnell on the road for a
year, and after a brief detour in New York City, he
returned to Toronto and the life of a studio musician — at
a time when there was a lot more TV show and commercial
work for horn players than there is today.
In 1968, McConnell formed the Boss Brass, which took
advantage of Canadian “content laws” mandating that a
certain percentage of broadcast music be Canadian-made. The
Brass performed middle-of-the-road versions of Top 40 hits.
But McConnell tired of that quickly. The Thad Jones-Mel
Lewis Orchestra, a modern jazz big band that held forth at
New York’s Village Vanguard every Monday night from 1966 to
1978, had made a huge impression on McConnell. He started
writing jazz charts for his band in 1971, and the Boss
Brass began boppin.’
The band made numerous recordings, including one
accompanying Mel Torme for California’s Concord Records in
1986, which led to Concord signing the Boss Brass in 1990.
Since then, the band has added seven more, including
another with Torme. And McConnell has recorded two with
trios and one with a quintet besides. McConnell’s most
recent discs are “Big Band Christmas,” a retrospective
called “The Concord Jazz Heritage Series: Rob McConnell
& The Boss Brass,” and a trio album, “Three for the
Road.”
A number of the musicians have been with McConnell for all
30 years, like the sublimely lyrical guitarist Ed Bickert
(who plays a beat-up solid-body Telecaster more suited to a
country picker), fluegelhornist Guido Basso and trombonist
Bob Livingston. Saxophonists Rick Wilkins and Moe Koffman
have been around 25 years-plus. That kind of continuity
gives the band uncanny precision, and it means that
McConnell writes for distinctive musical personalities, not
merely for instruments.
Nevertheless, it’s not quite the Ellingtonian ideal of a
long-term relationship, because The Brass doesn’t tour all
the time. Instead, McConnell flexes his improvisational
muscles in his trio, with guitarist Bickert and bassist
Neil Swainson. He also fields a scaled-down big band called
the Rob McConnell Tentet. Many college bands play his
charts, and McConnell makes appearances as a
clinician/teacher, as he did at Duquesne University in
October.
The process of scoring music for the Boss Brass’ 21
instruments is a difficult one, McConnell says.
“It’s painstaking. And it’s a very lonely and unrewarding
existence, to be an arranger/composer in the basement of
your house, or first floor. I’ve tried it on several
floors, and it doesn’t get any better,” he says, laughing.
“Currently, it’s the basement again.
“I like doing it, but it is quite hard work. You don’t get
anything back whatsoever, except kind of your own jollies.
Or your own hardships. I mean I’ve started arrangements
that I can’t finish, and so on.
“An arrangement for the Boss Brass, for 20-plus players,
it’s not something you can do overnight. Some of the best
ones I’ve done have taken the least amount of time, and
some of the others have taken the most amount of time. The
Christmas album took me over two months of seven days a
week, starting when it was dark in the morning, which means
before 7 a.m., till noon, 1 p.m., 2 p.m.”
The much-hyped phenomenon of 20-somethings suddenly dancing
the Lindy Hop to swing music and propelling groups like the
Squirrel Nut Zippers, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and the Brian
Setzer Orchestra up the charts might seem to promise more
work for band’s like McConnell’s. But it’s not so.
Speaking, he says, for other established big bands — Bill
Holman, Count Basie/Grover Mitchell, Maria Schneider, for
example — as well as his own, he comments:
“We’re involved in jazz, and jazz is no more popular than
before this swing misnomer got started. I mean it’s
definitely an improvement over Metallica, but it hasn’t
anything to do with us. It’s actually more rhythm and
blues. It really kind of goes back to the ‘ 40s, Erskine
Hawkins and those types of bands — four or five horns, a
singer, some guitar, shuffle rhythm and a lot of dancing
and zoot suits and all that. I never had anything to do
with that in the first place.
“I don’t have anything against any of these things. They’re
just kind of popular music things. Jazz is essentially
unpopular music.”
McConnell has shown the ability, however, to operate
somewhat outside of established jazz boundaries. Just
listen to the beautiful arrangements of carols on his
Christmas CD — tunes he’s been carrying in his heart since
he sang in the church choir as a child. Then there’s the
band’s arrangement of “ Oh Canada,” the Canadian national
anthem — and a tune not much more revered up North than
“The Star-Spangled Banner” is here. McConnell recorded a
jazz- tinged but sweetly reverential version of “Oh Canada”
as the last tune on “Even Canadians Get the Blues.”
“We’ve had more luck playing that chart in Canada than
anything we’ve ever played since the band started. And in
my wildest dreams I would not have thought so.”
To paraphrase those old Frank Perdue commercials, it takes
a tough man to make a tasty big band - which might explain
another facet of McConnell’s character. He is, in his own
words, “outspoken.” This past summer at the Toronto Jazz
Festival, a PG reporter watched with about 1,500 others
while hapless Canadian Broadcasting Company technicians
delayed a Boss Brass concert for an hour as they tried to
get their equipment working for a nationwide feed. A big
guy with a twinkle in his eye and a half-grin that blunts
his barbs somewhat, McConnell unleashed a volley of jokes
about the CBC’s competence.
But if McConnell does not suffer fools, he can also be
quite generous, as when he compliments WDUQ-FM’s Tony Mowod
and Shady Side Academy’s Peter Kountz, in particular, and
the rest of the Friends of Howard Gendell MD, the
organization bringing him here to honor the memory of the
late Pittsburgh neurosurgeon and pianist.
“Our hosts have been most gracious, and I know most of them
now, and everything has gone like dickety-boo. We’ve never
played in Pittsburgh before. And I think it will be really
quite delicious.
“I think this is an important concert in Pittsburgh’s life,
and we’re very happy to be part of it.”
Where: Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Tickets: Patrons $ 150; contributors $ 100; other seats $
50, $ 35 and $ 25; 412-323-1919.
Information: Howard Gendell MD Hotline, 412-968-3085.
Photo: Rob McConnell
Copyright 1999 P.G. Publishing Co.
