In January Blue Note will release the latest edition of Joe Lovano’s Us Five journey. Titled “Cross Culture” the release will feature the original Us Five lineup – with the distinctive double trap drums of Francisco Mela and Otis Brown lll, James Weidman on piano, and Esperanza Spalding on bass. Due to the rapid expansion of Ms. Spalding’s burgeoning career as a leader (including recent the recent citation as Jazz Artist of the Year in the 2012 DownBeat Reader’s Poll), Joe has engaged another young Berklee stalwart, Peter Slavov, to alternate the bass chair; and the distinctive guitar voice from Benin, West Africa, Lionel Loueke, appears on several tracks as well.

In preparation for writing the liner notes for “Cross Culture”, I caught the band back in September when they made an impressive 2-night stand at Blues Alley in DC. That was absolutely one of the best sets I’ve seen all year! From witnessing Us Five at Blues Alley – including the hoots & hollers of encouragement from an obviously gassed audience – I can attest that this is one of the finest working bands in the music; and that’s the key – they’re working; they’re actively evolving through performance, and not just rehearsing for the next moment. When considering the live evidence coupled with the evolution of their 3 records, I can attest – this is a true BAND.

Next April 20, Tri-C JazzFest will throw Joe Lovano a 60th birthday bash in Cleveland at the Ohio Theatre (go to the Clients section of this website – www.openskyjazz.com for complete Tri-C JazzFest ’13 details). For that event Joe will augment Us Five with several of our Cleveland homies, including tenor master Ernie Krivda and B-3 ace Eddie Baccus.

Following Us Five’s joyous first set at Blues Alley, I caught up with Joe for some questions about his exciting forthcoming new release “Cross Culture.”

Referring to Us Five you’ve said, “everyone is leading and following.” Is that about the same kind of band philosophy as Joe Zawinul’s declaration at the beginning of Weather Report that “We always solo, we never solo…”?

JL: Yeah, and the concept that they had was a group effort of creating music within the structures of the pieces. For me in my development, that idea and those players like Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Miles, Coltrane, Sonny Rollins… people that brought that element into their approach as bandleaders always influenced me a lot. I found myself in a lot of bands that played with that kind of idea; like Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra for example, the trio with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell… And then developing to the point of playing with Hank Jones, and to record with him and play with him.

[Hank] spoke about this, about following and leading in the same time, and how you accompany and how you feed the soloist ideas and react to them – playing with him in a duo and a quartet setting as well. And that’s why Hank – through the years – every record he’s on, whether its with Cannonball and Miles or Bags & Trane, the way he fed off of the soloist and fed them at the same moment from within the rhythm section… For me, playing with Hank really solidified a lot of things about how to improvise together to create music together.

This particular quintet – Us Five with the double drummer configuration – adds this other element of creativity that happens when we’re playing, whatever kind of piece of music it is, whatever kind of song form or structure or open phrases, to break down into groups that are possible within the quintet; that’s been the idea from the beginning, for me to have a group like this, it wasn’t just to play at the same time, it was to really try to lead and follow. Not just play solos…

Certainly not the standard Head-solos-head format…

Yeah, to really create some inner structures. So within the repertoire you have a band that can be a total new music experience every time through.

It’s interesting the way you will play little almost vignettes of a familiar piece (perhaps a Bird snippet) and then launch into something extended and original.

Right, using themes and events that can happen – musical statements that can lead. Like in this piece that we call “Birdyard”, it’s a free flowing collage of some of Charlie Parker’s themes, and harmonies and structures… but just kind of flowing within the band as we’re moving along. And when the tempo changes and key changes and all those things are spontaneously happening, from listening to each other and trying to put things together. That’s been a really fantastic exploration and something that’s been developing over the last period within this band.

How is it working with largely younger musicians in your band?

As you come up in this music, it’s a multi-generational experience from the beginning. I found myself as the youngest cat in almost every band I was ever in, for years and years. Then as time goes on things evolve and before you know it you’re feeding off these generations – and multi-culturalism also in the music. So that’s been a really fantastic realization.

Is that where the whole aspect of the “Cross Culture” idea came from – what with a multi-generational/multi-cultural crew of musicians making this record?

The personnel definitely has come together with that [in mind], but the whole cross-cultural thing for me has been the international touring that I’ve done – and the collaborations around the world with people since I was 23. My first European tour was with Woody Herman’s band, and sitting in and playing with drummers from Morocco in Berlin, and experiencing all these different elements in the music in Asia and Africa, the Middle East and all over Europe, North and South America… It’s been amazing to travel like that and to go and play with players from those places. And I have a collection of instruments from those places that I’ve collected through the years.

That flute you played this evening is kinda new, right? Where’d that instrument come from?

That’s a beautiful instrument that flute. I got that in Belfast, its African wood and I’ve been playing that one for about the last 8 years or so. But collecting gongs; I have a koto I’ve been playing since the mid-80s when I first went to Hong Kong; African drums, and hand drums and gongs from Asia and the Middle East, from Turkey…

Well we do know you’re a closet drummer.

I’ve been playing drums and involved in that experience and exploration and study since I was real young. My dad played tenor and I guess sometime in the late 50s – I was about five or six years old – and the drummer he was playing with got a new set of drums and gave him his old drums. One day my dad showed up and before I knew it I had a full drum set in my bedroom at my grandmother’s house where we were living at the time. At the same time I was learning melodies on the saxophone and learning the technique of getting around on my horn, I was sitting at the snare drum and the cymbal and trying to play the melodies that I was trying to learn on the saxophone.

So it became a melodic experience on the drums for me at first, until I started to actually play some time and accompany people. But that whole thing about vibrating on flutes and instruments from around the world has been a real meditation for me, from a really early age.

As far as making records, the whole idea of arranging pieces for two drums in an acoustic setting like Us Five, what kind of challenges do you deal with as far as arranging the pieces for a record date?

At the beginning, like “Folk Art,” the first recording that we did, there were a few tunes that had more set arrangements and I wanted to explore playing as a quintet and then breaking down into specific quartets and trios, so in that sense I kinda mapped out a few arrangements for that first recording. That tune “Powerhouse” that starts out that record, had a set form where the drummers played off each chorus and played off of each other’s ideas under one soloist. So to keep a mood and to keep a smoothness – plus be yourself – was a real challenge.

By the time we recorded “Bird Songs” we were touring a lot and on the gigs I was playing Charlie Parker tunes, Coltrane’s tunes, Billy Strayhorn’s music, some Thelonious Monk… I started adding some tunes that I had played with Hank [Jones] within the repertoire of Us Five. All of a sudden different things started to happen when we were playing famous music and playing it within the flavors of who we are as players. I started to re-arrange some things – like to play “Donna Lee” as a ballad, instead of the bright, brisk tune that it always is. And to play “Yardbird Suite” as a hymn; and I wrote a little interlude between choruses that fit into this other kind of rhythm… little things just seemed to happen from playing together a lot.

“Cross Culture” was a lot more spontaneous. I wrote some themes and some inner parts for the bass and guitar, with Lionel in mind, and I let the rhythm happen from within the way I was playing the heads. The tune “In a Spin” is like a whirling dervish. When we first ran it down at the record date, I could tell Otis and Mela weren’t sure – ‘what kind of beat do you want off of this?’ I said play what you feel off of this and I just played these quarter notes, and then it just took off and all of a sudden that was the take. So there was some real spontaneous energy and rhythms that happened from just the way I played the theme.

Within the repertoire of the band I could segue from whatever tune I want to by just playing the feeling of it, and all of a sudden we’re in a new tempo and a new harmony.

On several compositions on “Cross Culture” you switch horns in the middle of the piece. Does that happen spontaneously or is that planned?

That did happen spontaneously on the record. I had a few of the tunes when I just played one specific horn – like the G mezzo soprano on “Journey Within”; the Aulochrome – the double horn – harmonizing on “Modern Man”, a tune that I first played with Ed Blackwell and wrote for him on a recording we made called “One for the Soul.” We played it in duet and I played alto on that tune. There were a few things where I had something specific in mind, there were other tunes where I switched in the middle and instead of playing like one solo after another, I played a couple of times on the same piece at different moments on different horns, and played shorter little statements.

I didn’t look at it as much as a solo as like statements along the way. When you switch horns the timbre and the color changes and all of a sudden it’s like a new moment in the same tune. I’ve been exploring that more and more and with this band it really moves beautifully. Because when I switch horns all of a sudden its like another moment, like a trio moment or another quartet sound, or just a duet moment for a second on another horn. I played the Taragato and then some gongs and log drums and different things.

I noticed that you didn’t go real long with these tunes on this record (averaging 6 minutes).

They’re statements of – you call them tunes, but they’re really like… little events that move right along. Wayne Shorter speaks of some famous tunes of his that others have played; he considers them not finished yet. That’s how I’m starting to feel about my music and especially about the way we’re exploring things in this band.

After the first set at Blues Alley, I sat down with drummer Otis Brown and bassist, Esperanza Spalding to get their take on working with Joe and Us Five.

Talk about playing in Us Five.

Otis Brown lll: [I Otis at the same time as Joe did, at the Monk Institute summer session at Snowmass-Aspen, CO in the summer of ‘99; I was out there with a film crew shooting footage for the old BET Jazz show Jazz Ed TV I used to produce and host]. Man, what can I say… Us Five is from the mind of the genius Joe Lovano [laughs]. He put together some amazing musicians and it’s always a pleasure to play with. We all have relationships outside of Us Five too and we came together… For Mela and I, we were kind of wary, we didn’t know what it was gonna be like, how this was going to work with the two drummers.

I suspect know that’s a work in progress.

OB: It is a work in progress, but it’s always a work in progress. Joe kinda had a concept in mind when we came to it, he kinda had it mapped out – like ‘Mela here, Otis here…’ And now it just happens organically. But in the beginning he had a specific idea in mind and thought that we would be the two right [drummers] to bring it together, and it’s been magical sometimes. Now the way the communication happens, there’s no other band like it – and nothing I’ve ever played in has been like this.

And what’s your take on Us Five?

Esperanza Spalding: What do you want to know? You know what, I’ve been thinking about this since I got your email [laughs]…

So I’m putting you on the spot?

ES: No, I’m not on the spot, I don’t think about it very much, like intellectually; I don’t think about good vocabulary words and stuff… I just really feel it, and that sounds very corny and clichéd, but when I remember this band or think about Joe or this ensemble, I get this feeling and its like such a joyful, excited feeling just about the music that happens. I’m not using my small ego self to think about it very much, honestly.

But the one thing that I did think a while ago – like one of the only cohesive, intelligent things… was the fact that the way the two drummers communicate is very ancient. I was just thinking like ‘wow’, I wonder if Joe was thinking about that when he had the idea of having two drummers talking in that way that they talk.

It really was ancient in one part of that set, where they were communicating in a very African way!

ES: Its like standing between them, Otis says something and Mela’s listening like proactively, and then he says something… and they’re like the pillars of the communication in a way. I just felt like maybe we’re tapping into some very ancient form of communication, like some very pure – not pure in the sense of uncontaminated, but just innate way of communicating. So to have that as the core of all of the phenomenal technical, soulful capacity harmonically, I just think its like the perfect balance. And I notice, like tonight on the first set, the audience gets here and they’re like ‘ok we’re gonna hear Joe and hear some music, so its like a certain level of excitement. And as soon as that first song kicks in, people are like ‘whoa…’ you can feel the energy and the excitement, and the eagerness to hear what the heck is gonna happen next just swell in the room. And then by the end of the set everybody’s is going… people are like really writhing with the excitement of what they just heard. And for all that’s going on that’s like hip, and all the years combined of people working on this music, its almost like something is distilled that’s like the essence of the communication aspect. The communication is sort of a universal thread that makes everyone see the concept; and its something about this band that it has distilled that. I think there’s an element of this ancient communication happening that’s sort of like a distilled thread of universal communication – person-to-person, musician-to-musician, however you want to look at it.

Look for the release of “Cross Culture” on January 22, 2013… Don’t sleep!

Pianist Aaron Goldberg clearly enjoys some good eats on the road…

Best food at a NYC jazz venue:
1) Jazz Standard (almost everything on the menu + good service)
Excellent food at other US venues:
1) Sushi at Yoshi’s (Oakland/SF).
2) The macaroni and cheese at Dazzle in Denver.

Tasty Sides

Flutist Bart Platteau and his spouse, pianist-composer Amina Figarova on Jazz Eats on the road…

“Different clubs where we love the food are Snug Harbor in New orleans, the Jazz Alley in Seattle, Nighttown [Cleveland], and Jazz Standard [NYC] indeed too.
But I think Amina’s and myself favorite club to eat so far is the Dakota Club in Minneapolis.
The food is amazing, and you get the full experience, appetizer, entree and dessert.”

Tasty Sides

Capable, qualified artist management in the realm of creative music has long been in short supply; and by that I mean to suggest that finding truly qualified artist management is a dicey proposition at best. Don’t get me wrong here, there are certainly capable, qualified jazz artist managers; I’m friends with a couple of good sisters who are highly capable and caring managers for their artist clients, and there are certainly others in the field who do exceptional jobs on behalf of their artist clients. However, compared to the number of artists who might benefit from having a qualified personal manager, the number of capable artist managers comprises a small list. There are more than enough leeches out here, traveling and living off of their clients without a commensurate artist benefit, and there are more than enough artists who THINK they need management and enter foolish, or at best unproductive artist/management relationships. Including more than a few artists who are eager to enter into such agreements before they have a real sense of the business they’re in, or an artist manager’s responsibilities.

In my experience as a presenter I’ve run up against more than my share of artist managers of questionable capabilities – not to mention the many ill-advised would-be spousal-manager arrangements that unfortunately hinge on a lot more than a successful business relationship. An ongoing example of the shortage of good, qualified artist managers is the obstructionist or slow on the uptake types. Let’s say we’re presenting a high profile singer at Tri-C JazzFest; we make the booking – with the usual management slow-drag of stringing out our offer (despite the middleman booking agent’s suggestion of some artificial deadline edict) to the nth degree – and once the agreement is secured we suggest a “special guest” soloist or other artist on the bill (we are a festival after all, and festivals need that little bit of extra cherry on top for that true festival lineup). Why does management feel the need to string out presenters before saying a simple Yey or Nay? Then you have the management which after the booking has been secured gets a look at your lineup, their artist placement, or some other perceived issue and determines that there need to be changes made to the agreement. Can’t tell you how many incompetent or simply asleep-at-the-switch managers presenters deal with via the booking agent middleman – and here I’m generally NOT talking about the booking agents, which as I made clear earlier are usually middlemen in this process, and are separate and distinct from the personal managers.

Recently we had the experience of reaching agreement with a booking agent, and had begun to incorporate that booking into early marketing materials planning, only to have the booking agent call – hat in hand – to inform me that management had mistakenly green-lighted the date only to discover an overseas conflict! I ask you, doesn’t overseas suggest some measure of extra advance planning? Not to mention the fact that this particular date in question had already run up against a level of management foot-dragging. Our initial booking for the date had been with an artist whose agent strung us out for weeks, finally accepted our offer, then got back to me to say the date was off because the artist had been working too much and needed a family break! And you didn’t know that already from the artist’s itinerary, which you’re supposedly on top of?

I suppose the larger question from this perspective is exactly when does an artist’s career require management services? I know more than enough business-savvy artists who do a more than competent job of managing their own affairs; but then for some there comes a time when those responsibilities potentially intrude on the creative process, so the need for management becomes all the more acute. As a firm believer in artists developing the business acumen to successfully manage themselves (and to by turns know the difference between competent and incompetent managers), back in my mid-80s Arts Midwest days I actually penned a self-help booklet for artists titled “A Musician’s Guide to Increasing Performance Opportunities.” On the other hand I’ve met and worked with a number of capable, self-starter artists who reach a certain point where their plate becomes overloaded and management becomes a necessity. When that point is reached, where do they turn for capable, qualified management? Part of my ongoing consultation with artists on the question of management has been to urge them that they should know enough about the business and its whys and wherefores that even when they reach the point where they need management to take those next steps, they need to be savvy enough and vigilant enough to know for certain that whomever they engage as a manager is doing the right things by their career; exercising checks & balances in their own career development.

A friend and very capable business person, one who has had a good career in both artist management and booking agentry, once gave me a simple formula by which she judged whether potential clients were management-ready. I won’t quote exact figures here because the rate of inflation has altered her original contention, but her formula suggested that artists were only management-ready when they reached a certain guaranteed annual income level above which they could comfortably and reasonably pay the percentage points required by a personal manager; because always remember, capable managers contractually take a percentage of ALL of your earnings to do their jobs properly. And one of the most salient points for artists to remember is this: your personal manager is NOT your booking agent. If you’re looking for a manager to get you gigs, then you’re barking up the wrong tree and need to secure a good booking agent; the responsibilities of a personal manager and a booking agent are mutually exclusive. Far too many misguided artists enter management agreements fully expecting that their manager’s job is to secure gigs. No, that’s not their responsibility; those relationships generally end badly.

In the spirit of encouraging further dialogue on this critical artist/manager issue, I’ve posted a survey through Survey Monkey – a survey that I assure you is purely anonymous and requires no name or other identifying elements. Please visit (web coordinates here) and take our Artist Management Survey (Click here to take survey). Then look out for the results in further dialogues in The Independent Ear.

As one whose listening interests have always been more invested in the composition side of jazz, someone for whom the jam session/blowing aspect (as in endless, rapturous choruses on “I Got Rhythm” changes) is of less curiosity than experiencing creative and successful improvising operating within the realm of compositional structure, I’m always intrigued by young musicians who come along with composition as their primary calling card in this music. One such composer is Darcy James Argue; that he bills his large ensemble exploits under the rubric Secret Society, coupled with my positive response to his music increased my curiosity about his motivations. Additionally, we had an earlier dialogue on questions of New York-based large ensemble personnel diversity, and quite frankly how it was that large bands such as his or John Hollenbeck‘s rarely reflected the diversity of the New York musician scene. His thoughtful responses compelled some questions for Darcy James Argue…

Would you best characterize yourself as a composer, arranger, bandleader or all of the above, and talk about your development of those skills.

I usually call myself a composer-bandleader. I’m always a bit surprised whenever my name happens to pop up in the “Arranger” category of Down Beat polls because I honestly don’t get called to do that very often these days. I think my last big arranging gig was for Lizz Wright’s concert with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and that was five years ago! I also arranged a couple of ’70s Donald Byrd/Mizell Brothers tunes for Secret Society to play alongside the 17-piece neo-disco band Escort at a show this summer, but that was a special situation. To date, the stuff I’ve written for Secret Society has been almost exclusively original compositions. That’s just where my head has been.

As for how I got started, I can actually pinpoint the first time I got excited about big band music: I was thirteen years old and my high school junior jazz band was learning (a simplified version of) a Thad Jones chart, “Us.” The band director played us the original vinyl and I was like “Oh damn, so that’s what this is supposed to sound like!” I immediately went out and got as many Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra albums as I could track down, and listened to them pretty obsessively all through high school. That’s also how I also discovered the music Bob Brookmeyer had written for Thad & Mel. Years later, I had the incredible opportunity to study with Bob while pursuing a Master’s at New England Conservatory. (If I could go back in time and tell my 13-year old self this was the way things were going to go, it would blow his mind pretty thoroughly.)

After graduating from NEC, I joined the BMI Jazz Composers’ Workshop, led by Jim McNeely and Michael Abene. This was a great resource — it allowed me to continue to develop my craft post-graduation, to get invaluable feedback on my music from Jim and Mike, to connect with other young composers and look at their scores, and to meet New York musicians who were interested in performing this kind of music. Most importantly, there is no tuition — if you are accepted, it’s free to attend! At first, I was still living in Boston and commuting in for the workshop every week via the Fung Wah Bus, but after a year of this, I decided to bite the bullet and relocate to Brooklyn.

What was the motivation behind naming your band the Secret Society and should we interpret something a bit cryptic in that name as it relates to your music?

It seemed to me that Henry Threadgill had the right idea — you should name your bands. I tossed around many different ideas for my bigband (among them “Witness Protection Program” — if you want to disappear where no one will ever see you again, you should join a jazz band) but I eventually settled on “Secret Society” as being appropriately conspiratorial. I also thought it would have the side benefit of instantly transforming what would otherwise have been just another poorly attended gig into something that felt more like an exclusive underground event for selected cognoscenti.

How have you gone about assembling the Secret Society and talk a bit about the band’s activities.

In the fall of 2003, my girlfriend and I packed up our Boston apartment and U-Hauled it out here. Once we were settled, I began setting up reading sessions for my music at the Local 802 rehearsal space. This was before the band had a name, before anyone knew who I was… there were certainly no gigs! I couldn’t afford to pay anyone for these sessions, of course. I could barely afford the $10/hour it cost to rent the space. But I’d twist a few arms and get people to come in and read through the music I’d been working on. This continued on a semi-regular basis until I had enough material to fill out a set, and in the spring of 2005, I finally landed the band our first gig, in the basement of the now-defunct punk rock club CBGB. We played there a couple of times before the venue closed its doors for good, and after that, at the (late, lamented) Bowery Poetry Club across the street, and sometimes uptown at Makor (also closed). The first actual jazz venue we ever played was The Jazz Gallery — which is now also being forced out of its longtime Hudson Street home. I swear this is not our fault — I’d hate for venues to think that having Secret Society grace their stage is the kiss of death!

Anyway, after four years of playing these types of shows around the city, our first album, Infernal Machines, was released in 2009 on New Amsterdam Records, and that’s when things really started to pick up for us. Even in this post-digital world where no one really buys records anymore, albums can still make a big impact on your career. They function as business cards that can help get you in the door at certain venues and festivals (albeit business cards that costs as much as a mid-sized sedan). The critical acclaim for Infernal Machines was tremendous, and that enabled us to do something most large ensembles don’t get to do much of anymore, which is get out on the road. We’ve been to Europe a couple of times, last year we played the Canadian jazz festival circuit, and in June we even made it down to São Paulo and Rio, which was an incredible experience for us.

What’s your sense of why so many large ensembles are either/or and do not always reflect personnel diversity?

This is obviously a very fraught question. I’ve had this conversation many times in person with friends and fellow musicians — it’s something I’ve struggled with and I think it’s a very important issue. I am also acutely aware that when white people talk about race on the internet, nothing good usually comes of that! Nonetheless, I’ll try to answer your question as best I can.

I think there is an underlying concern here, a concern which everyone in the jazz community needs to take very seriously, about the extent to which jazz retains its core identity as black music. In a lot of ways, jazz has been becoming increasingly diverse. Individuals from all over the world are lending their unique voices to the art. But I think it’s also extremely important for all of us who play this music to respect and understand where it comes from, and to support the ongoing struggle for civil rights and better opportunities for African-Americans — a struggle in which jazz has always played a central role. I’m sympathetic to those who have sought to emphasize the place of jazz within the larger context of Black American Music. The statement that jazz is Black American Music should not be controversial!

As far as Secret Society goes, we’ve had musicians from many different backgrounds perform with us over the years, and while the players have been somewhat diverse in terms of gender, it’s fair to say that the core personnel has been less diverse than I’d like in terms of race. I’ll speak to that momentarily. First, though, I want to be clear: every musician who plays with Secret Society has to have a deep understanding of and respect for black music. I make a lot of demands of the players who work with me, but the most fundamental is this: if you can’t swing, you can’t play in my band. If you look at the other bands that folks like Ingrid Jensen, John Ellis, and Matt Clohesy perform with, I don’t think there’s any doubt as to the esteem in which they are held by the musicians in our community. Critics often like to contrast Secret Society with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra — this comparison is deeply absurd on so many levels, but if writers are going to go there, I wish they’d at least take note of the fact that prior to Secret Society, our lead trumpet player, Seneca Black, was personally recruited by Wynton to play lead in the LCJO, a position he held for seven years.

When I first started to approach people about playing my music, I was (I think understandably) reluctant to put out a bunch of cold calls that began “Hey, you don’t know me or my music, but would you be willing to play this big band date at the Bowery Poetry Club for essentially no money? Did I mention the six hours of rehearsal?” So I did whatever I could to get a band together: I called up old friends from Boston and Montreal who had relocated to NYC, I brought in musicians who knew me and my music via the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop, and I reached out to players suggested to me by my composer-bandleader peers — musicians who were active in the “scene” of poorly-compensated large ensemble gigs.

These players formed the core of Secret Society in the early days, and most are still with me today. They’re the ones who’ve stuck it out with me through all of those unpaid rehearsals and underpaid gigs, many of them giving up much more lucrative opportunities in order to be able to play Secret Society shows. All of the music I’ve written since putting the band together has been tailored to their specific abilities. There’s an unfortunate tradition in jazz of young bandleaders, once they have achieved a certain amount of success, abandoning the musicians they came up with in favor of hiring more bankable names. That doesn’t sit right with me. Like Orrin Evans says, big bands are more than just the sum of their parts — they’re more like family: “I can call the baddest cat. We all can.”

It’s true that the scene of large ensemble specialists I drew from when I was putting Secret Society together is very small, and isn’t terribly representative of the diversity of the jazz community as a whole. In retrospect, could I have cast a wider net? Absolutely. It’s important and I should have been (and still should be) making a greater effort to get out there and hear a broad sampling of what’s going on around the city.

But if there’s one thing that unites jazz musicians of all racial backgrounds, it’s that the overwhelming majority of them did not decide to pursue a career in jazz because they dreamt of one day playing pain-in-the-ass bigband charts like mine. I know many, many players who chose jazz instead of classical music precisely because they did not want to play highly determined, intricately notated music with few opportunities for improvisation. Most jazz musicians quite reasonably spend their formative years working on skills more directly relevant to small group situations. There’s an extremely long list list of totally badass musicians whose playing completely slays me, but who wouldn’t be a good fit for my band for one reason or another. The skills that make someone a great jazz improviser are, in many important respects, completely orthogonal to the skills that make someone a staunch team player in a large ensemble. Finding musicians that excel at both is not easy for anyone.

There’s also a more fundamental question here, one that’s bigger than any individual bandleader: where are today’s musicians learning to play? Specifically, where are they learning to sight-read, to play in tune and phrase with others, to lead a section or blend within one, to balance chords, to reconcile twenty different ideas about where the beat is, and so on? These aren’t really skills you can develop on your own, no matter how talented or dedicated you are. You only learn to do this stuff through the experience of actually playing in a large ensemble.

The traditional jazz model of learning your craft on the bandstand, coming up through territory bands — unfortunately, that path just isn’t there anymore. The gigs and the bands that allowed that to happen in previous generations are extinct. The financial incentives for jazz musicians to develop superior large-ensemble playing and sight-reading skills are also much less than they once were. Time was, players like Snooky Young and Marshall Royal were able to make a solid living off of their studio work. Those opportunities have mostly vanished now too.

So if young players get any large-ensemble experience at all, they get that in school. And what we have seen has been a long-term trend (accelerated in the wake of No Child Left Behind) towards slashing or eliminating budgets for public school music programs all over the US. Schools that lack resources — and of course, schools located in minority communities are more likely to be underfunded — have had to make hard choices about what programs they can afford to offer, and music is often the first thing to be cut. The result has been that generations of potential music greats have been denied access to instruments and quality instruction because of where they grew up. Systemic inequality in education is a very serious problem in America, and jazz is not immune to its effects by any means.

What about those players who manage to overcome these obstacles and are accepted into a conservatory with a great jazz program — like, for instance, Juilliard? Well Juilliard costs an estimated $51,756 — per year. What are the demographics of those students whose parents can afford to pay that kind of money? What are the prospects for a jazz musician being able to pay back over $200,000 in student loans? Scholarships and financial aid can sometimes help, but ultimately, when you’re competing for these things against players who have reaped the benefits of generously-funded, well-run school music programs, that’s not really a level playing field. I think those of us who love jazz have a special responsibility to help ensure that it does not become the exclusive province of the very privileged. Everyone deserves the opportunity to participate in this music.

These trends are, unfortunately, not new. Thad Jones (my personal hero) observed to Leonard Feather back in 1978:

“I was at the University of Minnesota, where they have three jazz orchestras, and they have exactly one black student. Same thing at the college where I taught, William Patterson in Wayne, New Jersey.”

He also talks about how he found it increasingly difficult to recruit black musicians to play in the Thad/Mel Orchestra:

“It’s become a real problem. Basically, economics is at the root of it. At one time the scene was pretty well saturated with black musicians. But whenever there’s any times of privation, they affect the black musician three times as heavily as the white, so he’ll take whatever he can find to survive. Meanwhile, for every black musician there’s going to be ten white guys waiting and ready to join us.”

There aren’t any easy solutions here, but I think jazz musicians, educators, critics, fans, the whole community — we need to try to find creative ways to fight these systemic problems. I’m very grateful I’ve been afforded the opportunity to be part of the music that I love. At the same time I think it’s vitally important that young African-Americans have equal access to those opportunities, so that they can continue to play a central role in the shape of jazz to come.

What’s next for Darcy James Argue?

Secret Society is at The Jazz Gallery on November 30 and December 1. These are among the final shows in the Gallery’s current location, which is a listening room like no other. It’s a rare opportunity to hear the band up close and old-school, in an intimate and largely unamplified setting! The Jazz Gallery is a genuine treasure of the New York scene and we are hoping they will settle into a new permanent home before too long.

In January, I’ll be traveling to Copenhagen for a concert and recording with the Danish Radio Big Band — this is the group that Thad Jones directed after he relocated to Europe in the late 1970’s, so needless to say it’s a tremendous honor for me to be working with this group!

Then, at the end of April, Secret Society will finally be releasing our second album, Brooklyn Babylon. The record will include all of the music from the multimedia piece I co-created with visual artist Danijel Zezelj and premiered last year. We’re hoping to be able to take the full Brooklyn Babylon production — which incorporates live painting and projected animation in addition to live music — on the road next summer. Brooklyn Babylon is unlike anything else I’ve ever done, and I’m looking forward to being able to share it with a wider audience.

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