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Crazy like a fox

Don Byron wigs out on Bug Music

by Jon Garelick

[Don Byron] Don Byron has organized his new Bug Music (Nonesuch) like a feisty argument, an erudite thumbed nose at jazz purism and cant of all stripes. But the music itself bypasses polemics and goes directly for your pleasure center. The 16 tracks -- all drawn from the repertoires of Duke Ellington, the John Kirby Orchestra, and the Raymond Scott Quintette -- are bright spinning toys, engines of musical logic and loopy delight.

It's all "old" music, but probably few listeners will find it familiar. The oldest pieces are the Ellingtons: "The Dicty Glide," "Cotton Club Stomp," and "Blue Bubbles," all from the '20s, Ellington's "jungle music" period at the Cotton Club in Harlem. John Kirby's six-piece "orchestra" peaked around 1940 and soon disappeared. Raymond Scott is remembered these days, if at all, as a composer of hit novelty tunes of the '30s and '40s and, coincidentally, cartoon music.

Byron's life and work

Byron places them all on par: early Ellington, Scott's novelty numbers, and the disreputable Kirby, who earned critical sneers (despite popular success) with his arrangements of Rimsky-Korsakov, Chopin, Bizet, and Tchaikovsky for jazz band. At first glance, Bug Music is a joke, just as Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz looked, on the face of it, like a joke when it came out three years ago. But Byron is crazy like a fox. Every project he undertakes has a subversive edge and musical integrity.

The Katz klezmer parodies gained Byron his greatest notoriety. The album also has dogged him; it's pegged him as the African-American clarinettist who plays Jewish music. But every album (he's now done four for Nonesuch) reveals a new Byron. On Tuskegee Experiments (1992) he matched his exploratory original compositions with Ellington ("Mainstem") and Schumann ("Auf einer Burg"). The album of Katz material was bookended by two mournful Byron originals. Music for Six Musicians (1995) tinkered with Afro-Latin jazz forms, not only harmonically but by providing a political subtext, occasional spoken-word texts, and titles like "The Allure of Entanglement" and "The Importance of Being Sharpton."

All Byron's work has been marked by his humor, his socio-cultural obsessions, his rigor as a bandleader, and his own virtuoso clarinet playing. And the consistency of each album is also unique. Mickey Katz and Bug Music hold up not as party jokes but as real music, resilient and seemingly inexhaustible. They not only hold up under repeated listenings, they're downright addictive -- as addictive as, say, Tosca, the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head, or the early recordings of Thelonious Monk (pick your poison).

Despite Bug Music's disparate source material, it's all of a piece. In his typically sharp liner notes, Byron explains that he chose all the composers, in part, for "their love of hemiola, unusual chord progressions, minutely detailed arrangements, and their ability to fashion pieces that explore the talents of individual bandmembers."

It's no wonder that Byron's painstaking, note-perfect re-creations sound more alive than the work of most repertory bands and revivalists. He doesn't approach the music as a "specialist" in any particular genre. He's a generalist with a specialist's acumen; he may well be the world's greatest living jazz nerd. And his range belies his depth. His experience with klezmer goes back to his student days at the New England Conservatory, where he helped instigate the current klezmer revival. His hand-picked ensemble on Bug Music (varying in size up to about 10 players) attack the pieces with broad experience. Their individual, idiosyncratic sounds make them better "actors" in these pieces than most revivalists. (Did anyone ever play Ellingtonian Russell Procope better than Byron's alto man, Steve Wilson?)

The first CDs of early Ellington brought the blurred details of the LP era into high relief, but these new performances bring out yet more color. After a piano intro, "The Dicty Glide" (1929) moves into a swaggering muted trumpet solo backed by the gentle thrum and buzz of on-the-beat bass and banjo, with reeds moaning gently in the background. On the second chorus, there's a wonderful Ellington device: a one-note brass riff on the downbeat of each measure. On the RCA Ellington reissue (from Jubilee Stomp), it's nothing more than part of the tune's rhythmic backdrop. But here it's audible as an actual chord, with clear voicings that turn slightly dissonant the second time around.

Perhaps in part it's the scale of these pieces that allows Byron and his band -- and engineer Tom Lazarus -- to zero in on the details so lovingly. Cymbal hiss has never sounded so beautiful -- and so essential -- as it does in the Kirby sides with drummer Billy Hart. On Scott's "Tobacco Auctioneer," Charles Lewis's muted trumpet wah-wahs are all coiled tension over the strolling melody and beat (Lewis is exceptional throughout).

Almost all the pieces here are through-composed (only Billy Strayhorn's 1956 "SNIBOR" gets a modern interpretation), and the details are part of each's dramatic presentation; they're narratives that continue to unfold with new sonic events. Key to those events are great tunes -- hummable melodies, fractured, paraphrased, juxtaposed, resolved. Scott's "Siberian Sleighride" begins and ends with jingling sleigh bells. It's a nice medium-tempo canter of a piece with breaks for Russian dances, rhythmic jokes between trumpet and drums, melodies and countermelodies, duets and trios, and a shout chorus with a phrase of tom-tom and tick-splash from drummer Joey Baron. When those sleigh bells return to accompany the primary theme, the effect is both comic and poignant -- a midwinter's dream where snowflakes and fairies have been at play. (Yes, the group does do Kirby's take on Tchaikovsky, "Bounce of the Sugar Plum Fairies.")

There's no telling where Byron will go next. At the Middle East recently he performed his version of rap -- jazz and funk supporting two poets. His own pieces were interspersed with snatches of "April in Paris,' "My One and Only Love," "Tangerine," "I'll Be There," and "Happy Trails." He's also expressed interest in recording Mancini. He may never have the large, dance-happy audience of fellow jazz mavericks Medeski Martin and Wood, but he's truly part of his generation's vanguard. He's achieving his goal of making a music "above genre," and he's doing it by zeroing in on genre and contextualizing it with keen specificity. His nerdiness is downright visionary.

Byron's life and work