“In the next 90 seconds,” announces Wayne Horvitz, “I’m going
to change the arrangement of this tune, so talk amongst yourselves.”
Not an easy feat, considering that Horvitz, along with Robin
Holcomb and Tom Varner, has spent the evening piloting a big
band through tunes that borrow as much from Duke Ellington and Igor
Stravinsky as from John Coltrane and John Zorn.
Horvitz ducks between music stands, conferring with the trumpet
section (where I spot Thomas Marriott and Reptet’s Samantha
Boshnack) and making sure that the trombones and the imposing front
line of saxophones (which includes Mark Taylor and James
DeJoie) know what to play next. Sheet music gets shuffled and no
one seems to mind; the musicians are here to explore new territory,
not rehash familiar numbers.
I’m happy to wait; the exhilaration of finally hearing
WACO—short for Washington Composers Orchestra—at
their monthly Sunday gig is unlikely to wear off anytime soon. WACO
updates the New York Composers Orchestra, which swaggered through the
Big Apple in the late 1980s with adventurous charts by Horvitz,
Holcomb, Marty Erlich, Anthony Braxton, and others.
The soloists are superb; trumpeter Al Keith served up a
raunchy, wah-wah-ing plunger solo on “Don’t Stop Now (P.W.)” after
which the band somehow stomped toward a whacked-out polyphony that
ignited a saxophone battle between Eric Barber and
Greg Sinibaldi. Alternating between a sympathetic duet and an
old-school cutting contest, the pair stabbed, slashed, and parried with
champed notes and whizzing, quicksilver scales. Horvitz’s subsequent
piano solo yoked greasy gospel licks to clusters jabbed up and down the
keyboard. And that was just the first tune of the night.
If you’re lucky, WACO will reprise Holcomb’s “Nightbirds: Open 24
Hours,” a wistful tone poem enfolding ‘70s-cop-show jazz,
Gregorian chorales, and gritty, cacophonous eruptions from the entire
band. I was also taken with Varner’s “Old Man Trouble,” a canny
splintering of a familiar Ellington melody. Varner aptly describes his
tune as “what if Messiaen had heard ‘Cotton Tail’ and flipped and tried
to superimpose his clusters over ‘I Got Rhythm’ changes, and ended
it with a dying Mahler feeling.”
WACO (Sun May 31, ToST, 513 N 36th St, 8 pm, $5) is just one of
several improvising big bands that meet early in the week. Two bands
hold long-standing residencies at Tula’s: the Fairly Honest Jazz
Band (which trades spots with the Jay Thomas Big Band) and the
Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra (Sun May 31, Tula’s, 2214 Second Ave,
3 pm and 8 pm respectively, $5). Up north, vocalist Courtney
Cutchins sits in with the marvelously hued Jim Knapp
Orchestra (Mon Jun 1, Seattle Drum School, 12510 15th Ave NE, 8 pm,
$5/$10). 
