Mark Masters Ensemble

Mark Masters masterful arrangements of Sam Rivers music for a 13-piece band are both expansive and reductive. They’re expansive since California-based Masters has created big band charts for pieces that were originally recorded by quartets. The sounds are reductive though because all the material dates from 1965-1967, a tiny slice of the career of Rivers, who was born in this month in 1923 – 100 years before this date was recoded – and whose professional career lasted from the mid-1940s until his death in 2011 working with everyone from T-Bone Walker to Miles Davis and Cecil Taylor.

Masters who has helmed similar projects based on the compositions of Clifford Brown, Duke Ellington and others is helped by collecting a group of topnotch section players and soloists. You can appreciate his skill expressing varied moods listening to a trio of tunes slotted midway through the disc.

“Point of Many Returns” is a bright march whose aleatory set up prevents it from slipping into stage band innocuousness with Nicole McCabe’s alto saxophone harsh vibration in constant counterpoint with Dave Woodley’s pressurized plunger tones. The piece is completed by Billy Harper’s tongue slapping expression as the arrangement speeds up at the end driven by heraldic trumpeting. “Beatrice” is  a love ballad with guts  – written for Rivers’ wife – with Chris Colangelo double bass thumps steadying the pace and the choir of three trumpeters and three trombonists inserting radiant grace note among the matched exposition from Harper’s story telling flattement and baritone saxophonist Tom Luer’s thickening burbling breaths. Built around piercing unison extensions from the other horns, “Downstairs Blues Upstairs” is a romping shuffle, with brassy smears, bright squeaks and rippling triplets consistently responding to Harper’s note-bending honks and snorts.

Masters deserves kudos for how his polished arrangements create a new variation of tunes composed for a smaller ensemble and how by celebrating Rivers’ compositions he extends the jazz canon which too often is stuck recreating the real book standards by more famous players. However with the wealth of talent available here extending the playing past mainstream affiliation would have honored Rivers even more.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Fuchsia Swing Song 2. Cyclic Episode 3. Helix 4. Parts of Speech* 5. Point of Many Returns 6. Beatrice 7. Downstairs Blues Upstairs 8. Calls of the Wild# 9. Paean* 10. Ellipses 11. Luminous Monolith

Personnel: Ryan DeWeese, Mike Cottone, Nathan Kay (trumpet, flugelhorn); Tim Hagen (trumpet)*; Les Benedict, Fred Simmons, Dave Woodley (trombone); Nicole McCabe (alto saxophone); Billy Harper (tenor saxophone); Jerry Pinter (tenor, soprano saxophones); Tom Luer (baritone saxophone); Jeff Colella (piano); Chris Colangelo (bass); Kendall Kay (drums) and Mark Masters (arrangements)