CSO hosts Turnage at his best with Scofield but Ellington disserved

Here, with small cuts restored,  is my Saturday May 23 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday May 21, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Steven Sloane, guitarist John Scofield and trio, and other guest soloists.

Sir Duke and Scofield orchestral works are hit and miss

BY ANDREW PATNER

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Repeats Saturday evening May 23 at 8 p.m.

Marriages between classical music and jazz have been complex affairs with more than their share of noble failures, odd experiments, and mismatched spouses.

That for many years those on the jazz "side" felt an unnecessary obligation to prove the worth of their music only added to the feeling of shotgun weddings or at least a whole being less than the sum of its parts.  Orchestra players don't always swing, and jazz changes its character a great deal when 65 strings are onstage.

This week's Chicago Symphony Orchestra program, with works originating with Duke Ellington and guitarist John Scofield, realized by other hands, succeeds more than many earlier efforts but still has shortcomings.

Ellington was writing Les Trois Rois Noirs ("The Three Black Kings") literally on his deathbed in 1974.  Inspired by a Three Kings triptych in the Barcelona basilica where one of his Sacred Concerts was being performed, he sketched out three portraits -- of Balthazar, Solomon, and Martin Luther King Jr. -- but left the work unfinished.  Ellington's son and colleague Mercer completed it and gave it to Luther Henderson to orchestrate for its 1976 première.

So what we have here is about as much Ellington as "Mahler's 10th Symphony" is Mahler or "Elgar's Third Symphony" is Elgar.  Less, in fact.  But moments of the 22-minute work, including a rare Ellington foray into gospel, made it a good curtain-raiser Thursday, particularly with the exceptional solos of alto saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. and Chicago pianist Willie Pickens, making his belated CSO debut at age 77.  Still, this work would have to be slimmed down and shorn of its Hollywood-like string orchestration if it's to be anything more than a rarity.

With Scorched, Mark-Anthony Turnage has found another solution to the meeting of musical worlds, and it's intriguing.  From 1996 to 2001, he took '80s numbers by jazz guitar virtuoso John Scofield and made settings of them for jazz trio, full orchestra, and combinations in between.  Then Turnage brought them together into an 80-minute suite of 16 parts, first performed in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2002.

Even those who prefer other styles of jazz or who don't know jazz at all can see and hear that Scofield, 57, is a master.  Playing his trademark Ibanez semi-acoustic guitar, he is able to send out and bend lines in seductive ways. As a composer, too, he makes melodies whose shapes and harmonies move in unexpected directions. With his expert trio mates, John Patitucci on bass and Peter Erskine on drums, the collaboration was seamless.

Turnage is not a major melodist -- how many contemporary "classical" composers are? -- but he's a fine analyst.  He has made often fascinating things out of Scofield's tunes, with an understanding of how to distribute them among the orchestral players and the trio, soloists, and orchestra.  The work would be more effective at an hour's length, but it clearly involved both audience and CSO members.  It's Turnage's most interesting work heard here during his term as Mead composer-in-residence. In leading this U.S. première, guest conductor Steven Sloane seemed to have assimilated its own successful assimilations of styles and techniques.