The upcoming album New American Symphonies, available August 14 in stereo (with an immersive mix to follow in the fall), features an undiscovered gem. Or more accurately, a rediscovered gem. Trombone Symphony was written by composer Roy Harris for Tommy Dorsey in 1938, but never recorded until now. Upon listening to this wonderful piece, which has influences in jazz, classical, and one could say show music and popular song, it makes me wonder why it took so long to see the light of day.
On this album Trombone Symphony is paired with Night Suite, a modern work by composer Scott Ninmer. The recording, which features trombonist Jim Pugh, is superb both musically and sonically, the latter being no surprise as it was done by Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz in Digital eXtreme Definition (DXD). New American Symphonies has a large-ensemble band, with half a dozen reed players, four trumpets, three trombones, piano, bass, drums, guitar, and percussion. The musicians are top-notch New York players like Bill Charlap and Jim Beard on piano, and Ted Nash playing sax. The ensemble for Trombone Symphony was conducted by Marin Alsop.
According to a news release, it took years of research by Jim Pugh to bring Trombone Symphony to light. He ultimately discovered Roy Harris’s original manuscripts at the Library of Congress. Pugh found out that Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra had tried rehearsing part of the Symphony once before giving up, and it was never performed in public. It’s hard for me to believe. As Pugh notes, “if you close your eyes and listen to the first movement, you can hear where jazz would eventually arrive some 35 or 40 years later…it’s this remarkable little time capsule that slipped through the cracks of history.”
Jim Pugh. Courtesy of the artist.
Indeed, the first movement sounds contemporary and not at all dated. I could hear this as an overture to a Bernstein Broadway musical, or a piece by a composer of today. The tempo is brisk (no wonder Dorsey’s orchestra might have had trouble playing it), and the tonal colors are richly varied, with superb ensemble playing, and soloing and interplay between the piano, woodwinds, and brass. In fact, the album’s publicist sent me the full scores to the music, and it’s fascinating to see the orchestration on paper and then hear it come to life.
1930s pop music audiences might have been scratching their heads, while classical music aficionados would have, I think, appreciated the music as sitting right alongside American composers like Gershwin and Copland.
The second movement is more subdued, languid in tempo and enveloping the listener with rich, lower-register sonorities. Jim Pugh’s beautiful burnished tone complements the music perfectly. The music unfolds in a stately manner and as you would imagine, the trombone carries much of the melody. Gorgeous.
Scott Ninmer’s Night Suite is more “modern” sounding in its big-band jazz feel, chord voicings, and harmonic palette. It sounds freer, less “composed” with more room for improvisation and solo spotlights. In the first movement, “Eventide,” Pugh gets plenty of room to solo, and the band is adept in their call and response. The music would be at home on a playlist of Don Sebesky, Maynard Ferguson, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Christian McBride, and other large group brass and woodwind ensembles.
The second movement, “Gliding Through the Darkness,” begins with an arpeggiated electric guitar figure doubled by various instruments, and then the brass and winds join the proceedings with lush background punctuations. “Too Late,” the mid-tempo third movement, is airier and breezier, with weaving melodies and jazz chops. As soon as I heard the guitarist, I knew I had heard him before but couldn’t place him. I checked the liner notes and, ah, Jon Herington of Steely Dan fame. I’m thinking Donald Fagen would dig this. I certainly do.
The sound is ravishing. The soundspace is enveloping, wide, and deep, and this is in stereo – believe me, I’ll be auditioning the immersive mix at the earliest opportunity. The tonal balance is to my ears impeccable. Instrumental textures are easy to discern, and stand out even when the orchestrations get complex. There’s weight and presence and superb dynamic range. You never get the sense of “listening to a recording,” but rather of merging with the music. On a high-end system, this recording is really wonderful, a reminder of why we all do this audiophile thing.
Naturally I needed to ask Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz how New American Symphonies came about.
Frank Doris: How did the Trombone Symphony, such a great piece of work, go unnoticed for decades?
Jim Anderson: It was buried in the Library of Congress in a box. In fact, the story begins with Jim Pugh. [He] was reading a biography of Leonard Bernstein, [where] he was talking about how all the composers of the 1930s were writing for Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw and people like that. And there's a sentence [in the book] that said, “And Roy Harris wrote a trombone concerto for Tommy Dorsey.” And Jim said, “What?”
And so he snooped around for a while and finally got permission to go to the Library of Congress and look in Roy Harris's papers. They went through box after box after box. First he found a score, and then some parts. Eventually he [found] the score for one movement and the parts for a second movement. And so what he then did was to recreate both parts.
Then he spoke with Harris's widow and got permission to go into the studio and see what it sounded like. If you notice, the first movement is really almost a piano concerto for Bill Charlap. That was sort of written for Harris's wife to play. Then the second movement is really Tommy Dorsey's solo. And then you notice it doesn't go anywhere. There's no third movement. That’s because the Dorsey band tried to play it after a gig at the Rainbow Room (in New York) and they just called this thing unplayable and it was shelved. In fact, I think on one of the scores it says “abandoned” or something like that.
Ulrike Schwarz: And they were some very unkind notes [written on] the trumpet part. The players didn’t like it.
JA: Jim [Pugh] never told me what it was that was written, but some trumpet player wrote something disgusting about the piece and [said] it was just impossible. It wasn't your typical bebop from the ’30s. I mean, it was definitely years ahead of itself. But we went into the studio with some of the best players in the city, which means some of the best players in the world. And we knocked it out in about six hours.
Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz. Courtesy of Cecile Vaccaro.
About the Ninmer piece: he's a former student of Jim's who's gone on to have a pretty good career as a composer and arranger. And right now he's with the [United States] Marine Band. He wrote [Night Suite] in honor of Jim as one of his former professors. When we were in the middle of recording the Ninmer piece, I said, “Jim, whatever happened to that Trombone Concerto we recorded?” He said, “It's just hanging around there.” And I said, “With those two pieces we’d have an album.” So that's how we got these two pieces combined.
FD: For me, it's a combination that works, because it shows an evolution of music over the decades, and how the Trombone Symphony was ahead of its time and then Night Suite sort of looks back a little bit.
It sounds like there’s a lot of improvisation in Night Suite, and they wrote in spaces for Jim Pugh to improvise.
JA: Very much so. It's very much like a jazz thing. You hear Jim state the melody and then there are huge sections of improvisation.
FD: I love Jim Pugh’s sound, his tone. The tone of the trombone and the way he played it was the perfect instrument to fit with the music. If somebody would've played, say, a harmonica, it would've been jarring or irritating. But the trombone was just…you can see why the piece was called Trombone Symphony and written for that instrument in mind and it's just perfect.
JA: Well, Frank, what's really interesting about Jim is that he and I go back to seventh and eighth grade, back to junior high school in Butler, Pennsylvania. I heard him play 60 years ago. He was a true prodigy back then. He was a student of Matty Shiner who was the preeminent trombone teacher in Pittsburgh. Then he went on to Eastman School of Music and was with Emory Remington. So he studied with the best really. But at the same time, he was just a phenomenon. I mean, you might even call him a freak. He was born to play that instrument.
FD: The sound of the recording is wonderful. Copper readers are going to want to know the tech details.
Ulrike Schwarz: The recording system was 32 channels of DXD [using the Merging Technologies] Pyramix. I think we [also] had an extra eight channels. Everything was mixed with the Merging Technologies SuperClock. Both recordings used ribbon microphones on Jim’s [trombone], an RCA and an AEA KU4.
JA: Jim plays with Steely Dan. [He told me], “When we're on the road, we have an AEA KU4 for the horn section.” And so we brought that into the studio.
FD: Was it all recorded live?
JA: Yeah, it was all live. I mean, there's a bit of editing. Jim didn’t have to do any corrections. And we had Marin [Alsop] conducting on Trombone Symphony.
[Editor’s Note: some of the mics had to be repositioned when the sax players changed instruments, and some flutes had to be overdubbed.]
And then the first piece, the Harris, we had Marin also conducting on that too. Both pieces were done in two three-hour sessions.
FD: You didn't break everything down and set everything back up for the two pieces? It was the same setup?
JA: They were done in separate sessions. One was done in Studio A at Power Station. The other one was done in Studio C at the Power Station.
US: You should [mention that] one was done in 1995 and the other one was done in 2023.
FD: So much for my acute ears!
JA: Well, frankly, I think it says a lot for our mixing in that the two pieces just blend together and you'd never know that there's a…
FD: Gap between them? Oh, I would never guess. I'm making fun of myself saying that I have bad ears and should be able to hear the differences. But no, it's seamless.
US: My job was to put them sonically together so that you wouldn't actually think there is a 30-year gap. When I heard the Trombone Symphony for the first time, I kind of couldn't really believe what was going on. I think the Harris [Night Suite] is such a standout performance and standout piece.
JA: It also adds a lot to the history of American music, frankly.
FD: I wonder how much other undiscovered stuff out there.
JA: Oh gosh, there must be. I was with [Andrés] Segovia in the 1980s in his studio and there was a pile, just a pile about maybe two feet high of manuscripts that had been sent to him for him to correct and make [arrangements for] guitar that various major composers had sent him, and he said, “I'm just going through these one at a time.” We looked at them and they were just fantastic pieces. Now that's just Segovia and the guitar. So who knows what else is out there as people go through these boxes in the Library of Congress?
FD: There could be a whole world of undiscovered music waiting to be found and heard.
JA: That's why we started New American Symphonies. Because [both pieces] feel very American and they really kind of show their roots. I think these two pieces really add a lot to the literature of the trombone.
FD: It's not an instrument that's heard as much as it used to be, which is kind of a shame because it's just such a beautiful-sounding instrument.
JA: He's got very much almost like a Tommy Dorsey tone on that second movement with the Harris.
FD: People are going to have newfound respect or knowledge or curiosity about the trombone just from listening to this.
JA: I totally agree with you. I remember one of my teachers saying, “If you have a good trombone section, you've got a big band. If you have that trombone section, everything will be fine from then on.”
******
Postscript: While working on this article, I received the sad news that composer, music educator and radio host Bill McGlaughlin, who had written the liner notes to the album, had passed away. His liner notes may be one of the last pieces he had written, and as a tribute, we publish them here.
Jim Pugh’s album of new American trombone concertos brings together two remarkable musicians who have been working together since they met as teenagers in a high school band in Pennsylvania over 50 years ago.
Jim Pugh took himself off to the Eastman School where he studied with the legendary Emory Remington, then joined the Woody Herman band before becoming the first call trombonist in the New York recording scene for many years, working with Chick Corea and Steely Dan, among many others.
Jim Anderson put his French horn in the closet and became a major recording engineer, beginning with a stretch at National Public Radio, moving into the New York studio scene and becoming the head of the NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. Among his many recordings are 13 Grammy winners.
The project that brought these two boys named James together is a venerable form – the Concerto Grosso, which features a soloist accompanied by a band of soloists —this vehicle goes back a long way, to the late 17th Century with the Concerti of Corelli, then moves ahead to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti and keeps moving right along, picking up such examples as The Ebony Concerto, which Igor Stravinsky composed for the Woody Herman Band in 1944.
The two movements from Roy Harris date from the 1930s and are here receiving their first recording ever. The composer — Roy Harris, is a self-proclaimed cowboy composer who was born in Oklahoma in 1898 but grew up on an orange plantation in Bovina, California, about 20 miles north of Los Angeles. As soon as he could, Harris sold his father’s farm and set off in search of proper music lessons. Aaron Copland gave him a hand, sending him off to Paris to study with Aaron’s teacher, Nadia Boulanger, the renowned pedagogue of so many young American composers.
The lessons lasted three years, but Harris was stubborn in resisting the Stravinsky-based style that Boulanger was teaching. “No sour notes in my music.” Every note is as sweet as baby’s breath,” Harris trumpeted. And so it was that Harris became the musical analog of Grandma Moses, down to affecting a broad brimmed sombrero and string tie.
This proved a smart career move. In contrast to more academic style (with lots of sour notes) the modernist composers were writing, Harris offered a straightforward music, very optimistic, in the midst of the Depression. His Third Symphony was premiered by Koussevitsky and recorded (twice) by Leonard Bernstein.
Harris was wildly productive. He wrote 19 Symphonies (Beethoven and Mahler and Dvorak could barely manage nine).
The Trombone Symphony was the inspiration of Harris’ wife, who was not only a highly respected pianist but also a jazz fan. “Roy,” said madam, “You should really write a symphony for Tommy Dorsey,” the smooth-sounding trombonist band leader, then at the peak of his fame.
And so, he did.
The work opens with a wildly fast bit of jazz inflected figures being tossed around until Harris felt he needed break. Where to turn next? Well, let’s throw in a fiddle tune: “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Sound familiar? Copland had used it in Rodeo, and it serves Harris as well as it had Copland.
The opening movement is so wildly virtuosic that the Dorsey band couldn’t play it on the one time they tried. So, Harris moved on to a more peaceful tempo for the second movement.
So, that’s the Symphony for Tommy Dorsey, which was never played until this recording. A short history — abandoned after one unsuccessful reading by the Tommy Dorsey Band at the Rainbow Room in New York City in 1938. And at this point, I have to direct our attention to the extravagantly talented band playing on this recording. Read the names of the players— a number are well-known leaders (Bill Sharlap, Jay Leonhardt) but they’re all stars and their playing shows it.
Scott Ninmer’s piece Night Suite is of much more recent vintage. He composed it for Jim Pugh in June of 2014 for a performance at the Eastman School. Ninmer had been in Jim Pugh’s classes for years and was well acquainted with Jim’s mastery of jazz styles of which he takes full advantage of the in three movement work. It’s nice to imagine Jim Pugh returning to his alma mater and enjoying the support of the terrific young players.
The work opens with “Eventide,” which moves from a relaxed swing to a suggestion of hip hop. “Gliding Through Darkness” calls upon woodwind doubles, supporting Jim’s easy improvisations. “Too Late,” the final movement gives us Jim’s commanding effortless high-register mastery, while the ensemble builds a big climax.
Altogether, this is an admirable album featuring a master soloist accompanied by absolutely first-rate partners.
Here’s a toast for our pair of Jims, two old friends putting together a stunning recording.
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