By Sage Um
Stan Kenton was a jazz pioneer who took the big-band sound of the 1940s and turned it inside out, creating a whole new progressive phase of jazz in the 1950s. His sound was still considered avant-garde in the early 1960s.
Later, when he hosted a jazz workshop at the University of South Carolina, a high school kid who heard him there became a devoted student of Stan Kenton for life.
The kid was Terry Vosbein, a Washington & Lee University music professor who has put together a concert in Lexington this Saturday, Oct. 8, celebrating the centennial of Kenton’s birth. The performance, part of Vosbein’s eclectic music series called Sonoklect, will include performances of some of Kenton’s lesser known pieces as well as a few of Vosbein’s compositions inspired by Kenton.
Performing the music will be the University of Tennessee Studio Orchestra and the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra’s trombone section.
The concert is a culmination of Vosbein’s years of research into Kenton’s music and his sabbatical trip to Paris this past summer, during which he arranged some of Kenton’s written music that Vosbein discovered in a manuscript collection at the University of North Texas. Kenton, who died in 1979, had left all his written music to the university.
“I first went through everything I found in the Stan Kenton archives,” Vosbein said. “Then I started creating my own pieces that really went with the flow of Kenton’s music and I was really inspired by Paris and Montmartre.”
Vosbein’s father, who collected records of progressive jazz, took him to the jazz workshop Kenton led at the University of South Carolina. “It was one of those life-changing moments,” said Vosbein. “I heard the band play its first note and I knew things would be different.”
Kenton brought big bands back into the jazz scene in the 40s with the “Kenton style,” calling it “progressive jazz.” With Pete Rugolo, his chief arranger, Kenton put together compositions for everything from quartets to full orchestras and ultimately created a unique branch of jazz music.
“What makes his music so wonderful is the drama,” said Vosbein. “It’s never just a boring journey and it’s really a heart-wrenching kind of music. He used such a wide range of sounds, rhythms and did something no one else really did back then.”
This is not the first time Vosbein has worked with the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. He already recorded a CD, “Progressive Jazz 2009,” which had some of Stan Kenton’s big band music that had never been recorded before. Vosbein also recorded “Fleet Street,” music from Sweeney Todd, which featured pieces that caught the critics’ eyes as something that a modern Kenton would do.
“The Knoxville Jazz Orchestra has some of the best musicians I know,” said Vosbein. “I’ve known their lead trombone player [Tom Lundberg] for 30 years and we’ve done so many projects together so now we really do have a connection. They know how to play my music and I know how to write for them.”
This time, Vosbein decided to integrate the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra trombone section with the University of Tennessee Orchestra to create a fresh mix of sounds.
This homage to Kenton will include a variety of genres of music such as ballads, bebop, swing and classical piano concertos. Vosbein said he deliberately picked music that has never been played before. To accompany these newly discovered pieces, Vosbein composed pieces of the Kenton style that will give balance to the entirety of the repertoire.
“Almost nothing that I compose, whether it’s for jazz or chamber music or string quartets, goes without some influence of Stan Kenton,” said Vosbein.
The concert is open to the public free of charge in the Wilson Concert Hall in the Lenfest Center for the Arts.