’Trane in Blood
The Salt Lake Alternative Jazz Orchestra debunks the myth of scary music.
by Randy Harward
Jazz is scary. Not big-band jazz, that Harry Connick Jr. crap—the
hard stuff. The complex, adventurous stuff. The stuff that seems to
have no rhyme or reason, except to those who play it, much like the
haphazard way a masked maniac kills and eats people (it only makes sense
to him). Or how the big, scary world appears to your Alzheimer’s-stricken
grandma. Yeah, jazz is scary.
But it doesn’t have to be. Praise Miles, jazz doesn’t have
to frighten young children and fathers of young children. No, it can
heal broken bones and fill cavities. It can pop your back for you. It
can change your oil. It can even save you from Godzilla when the Hand
of God is busy doing other things. And it can broaden horizons. The
trick is getting people to listen.
“It’s an unfair stigma,” says Dave Chisholm, leader
and trumpet player of the Salt Lake Alternative Jazz Orchestra. Call
it, uh, jazzmaphobia? The 12-member group, which plays originals peppered
with new arrangements of tunes by John Coltrane and—of all bands—Nine
Inch Nails and Radiohead, exists to dispel this stigma, as well as give
some of Salt Lake’s many talented horn players an outlet.
The idea came while Chisholm was riding home from school with University
of Utah music professor Tully Cathey. Says Chisholm of the epiphany:
“There were many horn players up at school who all could really
play, but didn’t have many opportunities to let loose in front
of a crowd.”
When Chisholm approached a few fellow horn players, several expressed
interest. He then assembled a rhythm section of guitarist Willis Clow,
bassist Will Lovell and drummer Steve Lyman and soon, the project was
tootling along. Chisholm set a goal to have a night’s worth of
material by the end of January so SLAJO could begin gigging by the following
month. SLAJO played its first gig at the Urban Lounge in February and
the reaction was such that the band has been invited back each month
since.
“We have had great crowds at all of our shows,” Chisholm
enthuses. “I mean, really awesome. Word-of-mouth is strong in
this town; the community is tight. If a new band is good, word gets
out quickly. I think the band puts off a certain energy that makes the
crowd want more, and we completely feed off that, not to mention that
we play good music that isn’t pretentious or snobby.”
The cover tunes factor into SLAJO’s appeal, in that the complexity
of jazz is often overwrought. Hearing popular music in a jazz context
helps neophytes realize this. As Chisholm puts it, if you look at the
original versions of the songs most “jazzers” play, such
as show tunes, they are much more straightforward than even the standard
4/4 rock tune. SLAJO just takes the core material and adds elements
they like, “with respect to the original material.”
“I think covering a tune people know and love forces them to listen
to our original music with a different ear. Many people think jazz music
and jazz musicians enjoy confusing the crowd and, by playing tunes that
they know, we are reaching out, so to speak, and telling them that we
listen to the same music that they do.”
To play jazz snob’s advocate, isn’t that slumming?
“It’s funny, a lot of jazzers probably think we’re
lowering the standard of this beloved music by playing modern pop tunes,
but I think jazz has always been a sponge. Miles [Davis] covered ‘Someday
My Prince Will Come’ in 1961. It was then a pop tune, and now
a jazz standard. Who’s to say that a tune like [Radiohead’s]
‘Fake Plastic Trees’ is any different?”
So now that SLAJO is opening new ears to jazz, frightening away the
bogeyman and reaping the reward of satisfaction (and a little extra
scratch from the gigs), what’s next?
“We’re thinking about making T-shirts that say ‘SLAJO:
Big, Scary Music for Big, Scary People’ or ‘Take No Prisoners,’”
says Chisholm. And he’s serious. “We’ll have it written
in blood.”