John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble: All Can Work
New Amsterdam Records

All Can Work, the third album by the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, pays tribute to the group's late trumpet player Laurie Frink, but it's anything but a morose memorial. Instead, the drummer/composer honours her in celebratory fashion with a collection bursting with vivacity, affirmation, and colour. Extending the idea further, the recording also pays tribute to others who've influenced him, namely Bob Brookmeyer, Kenny Wheeler, Billy Strayhorn, John Taylor, William Shakespeare, Kraftwerk, and Piet Mondrian. The ensemble's first two releases were Grammy-nominated, and with the level of craft and conviction so strong on the third no one should be too surprised if the trend continues.

Operational since 1998, Hollenbeck's outfit includes musicians with whom the drummer's been playing since high school and college. For this recording, JC Sanford conducted a collective featuring six woodwinds, nine horns, keyboardist, electric bassist, drummer, percussionist, and vocalist; many of the players are established names and bandleaders in their own right, among them pianist Matt Mitchell, saxist Tony Malaby, and trumpeter Matt Holman. Throughout this stellar set, Hollenbeck's writing is elevated by the orchestral sweep of arrangements rich in polyphony.

Deploying an imaginative, dada-like strategy to generate the lyrics for “All Can Work,” Hollenbeck strung together text from Frink's e-mails and sequenced them chronologically. Read in isolation, certain lines might seem mundane but the material nevertheless soars when delivered by Theo Bleckmann's smooth (and woodwinds-paired) croon and buoyed by the band's vibrant rendering of Hollenbeck's labyrinthine design. It's fitting that the repeated final line, “I will miss you all, and especially the music,” gradually fragments (in tandem with the instrumental accompaniment), suggesting in doing so a sincere adieu from Frink.

Yet if the album's emotional apex is, understandably, the title piece, it's hardly the only one of merit. The scene-setter “lud” certainly transfixes with an unpredictable melange of dramatic horn expressions and angular piano, marimba, and glockenspiel accents, while a driving treatment of Strayhorn's “Elf” (reimagined by Duke Ellington as “Isfahan” for his Far East Suite) grants a soprano sax-wielding Malaby a fine opportunity to strut his upper-register stuff. Hollenbeck tips his hat to pianist John Taylor and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler on an ambitious fourteen-minute version of Wheeler's “Heyoke” that dazzles, especially when taken at the rapid clip that it is here; given such details, it's hard not to hear the trumpet and piano solos by Holman and Mitchell as particularly heartfelt homages to the composer and Taylor.

For “From trees,” Hollenbeck drew for inspiration from Mondrian's early piece The Gray Trees, out of which gradually evolved the abstract, geometric style for which the artist's best known, his final, unfinished work Broadway Boogie-Woogie a good example. Representative of the composer's imaginative approach to the album material, “From trees” sees intertwining lines reminiscent of tree branch shapes woven into a shuffling rhythmic framework that references, even if skewed manner, boogie-woogie. At album's end, Hollenbeck indulges his playful side in a robust version of Kraftwerk's “The Model,” the tune a familiar cover choice from the group's catalogue.

April 2018