Bill Holman - The Arranger's Monk - Gary Giddins

 © Introduction Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected, all rights reserved.

“Seldom in receipt of the kind of plaudits some other arrangers seem swamped in, Holman has quietly put together an awesome body of work, and recent records find him in peerless form. …. A View From The Side [1997] is replete with frighteningly elaborate scores dispatched with the utmost elegance: to cite a mere two examples, sample the almost fantastical interplay of the sections on 'I Didn't Ask" or the rich, sobering treatment of 'The Peacocks', a concerto for Bob Efford's bass clarinet. Brilliant Corners [1998] is no less of an achievement and, considering the difficulty of arranging Monk tunes for big band, these ten charts seem like the work of a magician: has anyone dared score the title-piece in such a way? Here is one of the genuine masters doing his greatest work.”

• Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

“Holman internalized Monk long ago. He has had Monk pieces in his band's book since the 1970s and included "I Mean You" in his 1988 JVC album Bill Holman Band. In preparing for this compact disc, he sought out Monk's recordings to identify the pieces he wanted to arrange, but once those decisions were made, he cut off contact with Monk."

"I wanted to do it my way," Holman says, "so I decided to leave the area."

Holman says that his writing for the Monk pieces is more like the work he has been doing the past few years for orchestras in Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries.

"I'd always had that American big band thing in the back of my head when I was writing for my band," he says. "I didn't feel that the traffic in this country would bear too much 'out' stuff, that Americans like big bands to sound like big bands. This has abrupt changes in texture and mood, operating outside of the typical dance band vocabulary."....

"It's great to do things like that because jazz bands were locked into that four-part harmony for so many decades that to get away from it completely is freedom. Some of the guys in the band are still trying to figure out how these things fit into the harmonic scheme. Well, a lot of times, there isn't any harmonic scheme."

My conclusion is that Willis Leonard Holman is a wonder. Monk should have stuck around for this one.”

• Doug Ramsey, booklet notes to Brilliant Corners The Bill Holman Band Plays The Music of Thelonious Monk [JVC 2066-2]

The following piece featured in Gary’s Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century [2004] and was originally published in Village Voice 17 February 1998. It is used with the author’s permission.

© Copyright ® Gary Giddins, copyright protected, all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.

“A Holman arrangement is distinguished by several hallmarks, chief among them his ability to keep several balls in the air at the same time. Something is always happening….. A typical Holman moment is an epiphany of sorts, as if contemplation of the melody at hand spurred an unexpected juxtaposition, idea, or joke.”

“Bill Holman, who may be the premiere living jazz orchestrator and is surely a contender, is back, at 70, in rare form. One of the best records of 1997 was A View from the Side, and whatever 1998 brings, few albums can top Brilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk. Holman always keeps busy in Los Angeles and Europe, but records released under his name are so infrequent that they support a long-standing cult without confirming his reputation as a major figure in the development of big band music. Brilliant Corners may not change that, but it provides standards for an idiom that too often waffles in amateurish unoriginality and is sure to keep you searching for more of the same.

The work of all great arrangers raises the question of where the line is drawn between composition and orchestration. Several of the best, from Gil Evans to Nelson Riddle, were insignificant melodists who brought organizational genius to the melodies of others. Holman has composed several effective pieces—"Invention for Guitar and Trumpet," "The Big Street," "Far Down Below," "Concerto for Herd"—but he is never as inspired as when recasting a familiar tune. He is at bottom a variations man and a good theme frees his imagination, which exults in diverse effects, tempos, humor, melodic juxtapositions, and vigorous rhythms. The wonder of his Contemporary Concepts, written for Stan Kenton in 1955, is that he simultaneously reconfigured the big band for a world bereft of ballrooms while stressing the Count Basie dictum to pat your foot, in addition to transfiguring melodies like "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "What's New" and turning the intransigent "Stella by Starlight" into a concerto for Charlie Mariano that would have earned the alto saxophonist a footnote in jazz history all by itself.

Yet the concerto style is not Holman's forte, except in the Bartok sense of a concerto for orchestra. A Holman arrangement is distinguished by several hallmarks, chief among them his ability to keep several balls in the air at the same time. Something is always happening. It is a cliche to say that a bandleader makes a small group sound like a big band or a big band sound like a combo. Holman makes a big band sound enormous—given the luxury of 16 musicians, he seems to imply, "use them, all of them, all the time." Another hallmark is his distinctive use of counterpoint, which he never launches in a Bach-like fantasy, one melody bouncing off another, but in a kind of unison responsiveness, as though the melody under discussion suggested one or two related melodies that fit when played together. Why settle for a single tune when you have enough musicians to play several? Another hallmark is that the result is never cluttered and the secondary melodies often have a linear integrity to match the originals.

A typical Holman moment is an epiphany of sorts, as if contemplation of the melody at hand spurred an unexpected juxtaposition, idea, or joke. Brilliant Corners bubbles over with them. Indeed, Monk's title isn't a bad description of Holman's method. He keeps the big, colorful balls floating in front of your eyes, but you don't want to miss the action at the edges. A few Holman moments: Toward the close of "Thelonious," he harmonizes Monk's insistent one-note theme (actually, three notes, not that you'd notice) for unison flute and piano and you realize that the tune is Morse code—in any case, Monk code; in the middle of "'Round Midnight," he inserts a four-note riff from an introduction popularized by Miles Davis, but gives the first three staccato notes to the trumpets and the fourth to a wry trombone, conveying conversational whimsy even in this fleeting transition; "Rhythm-a-ning," a chart from 20 years ago and inspired by Basie's "Little Pony," begins with Monk's theme-how conventional!—but at the second eight bars is joined by a parallel figure and, after the chorus, the tempo crashes and the reeds invoke five seconds of Tadd Dameron's "Hot House." Holman is a fiend for Rorschach-test allusions. Elaborate variations on "Ruby, My Dear" include a bar of "Groovin' High," "Brilliant Corners" is spelled by a Charles Ives interlude, and a fleering reference to "Nardis" wafts by during one of the transitions in '"Round Midnight."

The endings of all 10 selections are pure Holman and utterly savory, none more so than the gearing up of drums to launch three thunderous blasts of brass in "Straight, No Chaser." On a few occasions he uses bent or sliding notes. The ultimate slurp is a tailgate trombone lick some six minutes into "Friday the 13th." Before you can wonder what it's doing there, the band is off on a full-throttle shout chorus, but the performance closes with solo soprano saxophone, which just happens to finish with a left-field slur. "Misterioso" is nothing but Holman moments. A bright two-note riff is immediately countered by a deep-blues bass figure to remind you what kind of piece this is. Then the melody hits and you have all three in the air—the riff, the bass line, the tune. Profligate with invention, Holman writes a completely different variation after each solo, though they all counter ominous blues voicings with unexpectedly cheerful riffs, including one that has the reed section competing with itself and another that amounts to a four-bar swing era interlude, right before a deep-blues bass solo. The other great blues, "Straight, No Chaser," is deconstructed from the top down, so that in the first few minutes the band plays not Monk's theme but a Holman variation based on the same rhythm; when a canonical transition two-thirds through finally triggers Monk's tune you feel you have earned its comfort, but before long Holman—whose chords are now waxing in heft and dissonance—can't resist pointing out that it reminds him of Til Eulenspiegel.

I haven't mentioned the soloists, and there are good ones —especially the saxophonists Lanny Morgan, Bill Perkins, and Pete Christlieb (whose "Rhythm-a-ning" cadenza pays homage to Wardell Gray). Solos in work like this invariably seem somewhat generic. Like a film or theater director, a bandleader exercises control over the performances when he chooses his cast. When big band soloists were innovators, they were as important as arrangements and sometimes more so. But as Basie pointed out when he regrouped in the early '50s, the writing lingers on after the soloists have gone. Holman has a crew of solid professionals up to every task he assigns, but the play is the thing and during the best of solos it is the orchestral backing, rhythmic change-ups, and Monk allusions (often fanciful or abstract) that excite your attention. Although " 'Round Midnight" was originally recorded by Cootie Williams's big band and Hall Overton successfully adapted Monk's own harmonies for an ensemble with seven winds, Monk is not often heard in orchestral arrangements (a notable exception is Ellington's 1962 "Monk's Dream"). The trick is to love Monk's music without attempting to replicate his style, which is matchless. Only Holman's "Bemsha Swing" disappoints, because his dated boogaloo beat pales next to Monk's geometric rhythms, and even here the secondary themes punch up the action to the point of near-euphoria. Elsewhere, the euphoria is fully realized—enhanced by JVC's audiophile mastering.” ….