Theme for Monterey
Los Angeles-based bandleader Gerald Wilson has been a perennial favorite for decades, earning a litany of composition awards and three Grammy nominations. He's also been a recurring fave of the Monterey Jazz Festival, appearing in 1963 as one of Jimmy Lyons's pet projects and then again leading a Jimi Lunceford tribute band in 1975 and, in 1976, offering a commissioned 20th-anniversary piece, the "Happy Birthday Monterey Suite." So this musical homage to the festival on its 40th anniversary has a long history. Wilson's 45-minute suite is built around a 40-bar ascending theme that gets played at a variety of paces, from the sultry "Romance" to the speedy "Cookin' on Cannery Row." His band plays with a heap of harmonic precision, capturing each nuance as Wilson sought to demonstrate the ensemble's crack capacity for agile subtlety at any speed. This is music that speaks dually to long-form composition and to the task of taking the complexity of orchestration and distilling it into potent doses. To demonstrate Wilson's distilling ability beyond his large-scale works, check out his takes on "Summertime" and "Anthropology" premiered at the Library of Congress as they began archiving the bandleader's works.--Andrew Bartlett