Canadian composer and pianist Jim McNeely finds inspiration in such places as the paintings of Paul Klee, he tells Ray Comiskey.
In 2005, the critic Stuart Nicholson published a book provocatively called Is Jazz Dead? (or has it moved to a new address). There's no need to guess where he stood on the matter. The book quotes the New Zealand pianist, Mike Nock: this "child of the 20th century", he said, "has now left home".
But there's more to it than that, as Nicholson makes clear in his book. Strictly speaking, jazz has become like HC Earwicker - Haveth Childers Everywhere - in Finnegans Wake, to such an extent that there are some who argue that the music's cutting edge has shifted from its American homeland to Europe. The jury's still out on that; there's too much worthwhile work being done in America, despite the heritage music influence of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and his critical guru, Stanley Crouch, for the US scene to be dismissed like that.
Yet those on both sides of the fence, or the Atlantic, would find solace in this year's RTÉ Living Music Festival, which includes jazz in its hallowed purlieus for the first time. And the global nature of jazz is epitomised by the presence at the festival of the Chicago-born composer and pianist, Jim McNeely, who will lead one of the music's great big bands, the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra (SJO), in a programme of his own compositions.
McNeely, along with compatriots Bob Brookmeyer and Maria Schneider, completes a trinity of probably the finest living practitioners of the art of composing and orchestrating for a jazz big band. Vastly experienced and nominated nine times for a Grammy, he was with the old, seminal Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra in the 1970s, which eventually mutated into the present Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, where he is pianist and composer-in-residence. Add notable associations with the SJO and the Danish Radio Big Band, among others, and long tenures with the Stan Getz Quartet and Phil Woods Quintet and his major league status is undeniable.
Likeable and modest - musicians will tell you that "Jim is one of the good guys" - he is open-minded and receptive to other art forms. And not just classical music. One of his most fascinating projects is also his most recent, a "suite" composed for the SJO, which brought together jazz with one of his longstanding passions: the paintings of Paul Klee.
"The Klee thing was a challenge," he says, "because it's the first time I had really to use some other kind of stimulus as the inspiration for the music."
He began with a postcard-size reproduction of Übermut (Cockiness) on the piano and started to play a few things.
"Then I thought 'this is ridiculous', because I can't work this way. So I found I had to do a lot of research. I felt like I had to get to know Klee as well as the paintings, and I found out a lot of things about his musical background, his own concern with polyphony and rhythm in his work.
"And I didn't want to just write music and say 'well, this melody is the red line up there, and this melody over here is the blue circle down there and this little quote here is the little dog in the left-hand corner of the painting. I didn't want a literal representation of the painting. I had to try to get in back of the painting and what he was trying to express visually, I wanted to try to hear that. Then I had to figure out how to express that musically myself, using my language."
It's an endlessly fascinating and ultimately, unknowable process, hemmed in on all sides by conscious and unconscious constraints: physical, emotional and intellectual, personal and otherwise. Klee himself once said: "When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed."
But in this case it has yielded a new orchestral recording, one piece of which will be performed here in Dublin. This is Der Seiltänzer (The Tightrope Walker), which emerged, thanks to the tänzer reference, as a graceful waltz which becomes an airy pas de deux, reflected in the call-and-response of the ensemble writing.
The remaining 10 pieces of the extensive programme planned for Dublin are drawn from music composed for the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and released on two superb CDs: Lickety Split (1997) and Up From The Skies (2006), for the second of which McNeely has received two Grammy nominations.
What was the thinking behind his choice of programme and orchestra? "The thinking was to present a number of things I've written over the years for different jazz orchestras and to represent the less traditional side. And I thought of the Stockholm band because they're one of my favourite all-time bands to work with. They play my stuff and my general corner of the world very well.
"And I thought that, because of the nature of the festival and the fact that up until this year it's been mostly contemporary classical music, and this year they're opening it up to jazz, I wanted to present some of the things that I thought were really more developed compositionally, and not so much some of the straight-ahead kind of things I've written.
"I feel that in my own writing I've still got one side of me that pays homage to Thad Jones and Oliver Nelson and guys like that, and there's another side of me that has been a little more out on a limb. So this is the side that we're going to present in Vicar Street."
Isn't it music that asks a lot of an orchestra? "Well," he laughs, "actually the Stockholm band has played Absolution, Sticks and Extra Credit from Lickety Split before, and from Up From The Skies they played You Tell Me and We Will Not Be Silenced. And also there's another one, something called Doers And Dreamers, probably the toughest one of the whole concert, that hasn't been recorded by a professional band yet.
"Yeah," he continues, "technically, the music is a challenge for any band. One thing I love about these guys is they work hard. They've really got a great feel for the music and at the same time they work hard to learn to play it well."
Like Brookmeyer and Schneider, he is essentially a long-form writer, developing ideas or motifs until they're transformed into something bigger, rather like musical storytelling. It's an analogy he accepts.
"I mean, I think of the way the main character of a play gradually may get transformed throughout the play and by the end might even be dead, or at least could be very different than they were at the beginning. This wasn't conscious on my part. I began to realise it about 15 years ago with music I was writing for the West German Radio Big Band. I began to see parallels between what I was doing and certain playwrights and directors and so forth, in terms of telling the story and keeping the play going."
One of the pieces which seems certain to arouse a particular audience reaction is We Will Not Be Silenced, which has a contemporary political resonance, though he's wary of inviting a facile response. It began life as a hymn.
"Well," he explains carefully, "there's a musical origin and a kind of social origin. Musically, I had a couple of days off in Frankfurt about four years ago. I was at the piano and I just started to write. I wanted to write a simple kind of hymn and this thing started to emerge." After stripping the initially too-dense harmony down to the bare, church-like bones, he began to make it more and more complex again. "At first I was just developing it musically, without thinking about a title; I just had the idea that it was a kind of hymn or prayer. This was post September 11th and, with the response of the inadequate brains that are leading this country - I don't want to go all into it, but one of the things the Republicans in this country kept saying was it's time for the liberals to shut up and support our president. And I thought, you know, we will not be silenced. This is too important just to try to scare us with thoughts of terrorism and patriotism and treason and all that. So that's when I started to work with that as a title.
"And when I started to do the arrangement of this piece I wanted the feeling that the tune keeps coming back over and over again, more complex and more dissonant, and bigger. And at the same time there are groups of soloists playing, like a group of people trying to find their voice instead of just wimping out the way so many people did here, the press and Congress. So I just used this piece as my own little platform."
As the recording proves, it's no knee-jerk piece of agitprop; it works as music.
"That's what I would like to think first of all. Sometimes I hesitate talking about it, because I know that, with certain audiences, all I have to say is the title and George Bush, and I've won everybody's heart. And I'd like to think that, even if I just called it Doin' The Dishes, it would work as a piece of music before any other kind of meaning is put on it."
In any event, the man and the music are inseparable. There's a quote from his notes for Up From The Skies that says it all. "The older I get, the ever more thankful I am to be a musician, able to do what I love doing." We should all be so lucky.
Jim McNeely plays with the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra at Vicar Street on Saturday
