SHIFTING MOODS

From Alexander Hamilton to Adlai Stevenson, intellectuals have suffered from bad press in the United States. Straightforward rhetoric and direct action serve our purpose; reflection slows the march of progress. Thinkers and theorists, outside of the research and development tanks of corporations, have had a rough time of it. No angels and no space for the exercise of concepts kept Emerson in his study, Melville in his cups, and Henry James abroad. Big band jazz, when it becomes experimental, joins a host of luminaries unread and unappreciated until long after their death (Emily Dickinson, Jackson Pollock, Charles Ives the list goes on and on) ...

Except for the Mel Lewis Orchestra. Since 1966, anyone who knows New York knows that Monday night at the Village Vanguard is Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band night. The angel was Max Gordon, who ran the club from 1934, paid the band, and gave them exclusive run of chart time for that evening. This trumpeter-drummer duo hired the best arrangers, gathered the best studio musicians on the local scene, and stretched the mind and heart of jazz with brilliant executions of standards and originals. Gordon, deceased this year but leaving us his autobiography as a goodbye, must be given credit for freeing the orchestra from the worry of a road band schedule and an audience with preconceptions about big bands. This band created its own sound, educated two generations of jazz fans, and made a place for itself in jazz annals.

As to conceptual space, this is a band of intelligence which, under Mel Lewis, brooks no compromise between mind and heart. Composer George Russell once said, ''We like to think that all this music we call jazz comes out of heart and feeling. And of course it does. But it also comes from an intellect of the heart -- an intuitive intellect that can't remain intuitive if it's to survive and transcend the circumstances of its birth."

It is no accident that two of the arrangements on this album by two different musicians owe a good deal to the efforts of Russell to make jazz more buoyant and excursional through his lifelong devotion to his Lydian concept of composition. You can definitely hear this floating quality in Mike Abene's counterpoint at the beginning of Irving Berlin's "Soft Lights and Sweet Music," and the spirit of Russell permeates Jim McNeely's composition "Off the Cuff."

Innovation with roots characterizes the sound here. There is an ample sampling of Berlin, Gershwin, and Van Heusen; but the attempt is to place this music in a new context, exciting and suggestive. In dynamics alone this is an exceptional band. Ken Werner's "Compensation" features him (on piano), with a toss of the hat to "Singing in the Rain," rising to crescendo with a full band only to back off to give Joe Lovano's tenor room to flow. The rhythm section and entire outfit build again to climax with yet another receding tide for Jim Powell's mello flugelhorn; up again with the high colors, a recapitulation by reeds, high trumpet work, and back to the: "Singing in the Rain" signature and out.

As with all great orchestras, each selection on this recording is a mini-symphony of shifting moods, tempos, and sectional devices. These pieces are a rehearsal of the traditions as well. Fifty-Second Street in the late '40s is written all over "Lester Left Town," with its small group with the larger group counterpoint. Gil Evans’ impressionistic writing of the '50s filters through a lovely rendition of "Little Man You’ve Had a Busy Day" (with Dick Oatts on alto doing a little echoing of the late Cannonball Adderley). The skill and craftsmanship exhibited here is reason enough for those Monday night sessions to go on indefinitely. Let us hope they do.