An Intricately Constructed New Big Band Suite From Trumpeter Tim Hagans

Trumpeter Tim Hagans‘ ambitious new five-movement “concerto” with the NDR Bigband, A Conversation – streaming at Bandcamp – came out earlier this month. The suite owes as much to contemporary classical music as it does to jazz. As you would expect from a trumpeter, much of this is very bright and brassy. Challenging moments outnumber the more consonant interludes. Hagans’ sense of adventure and large-ensemble improvisation is matched by an embrace of traditional postbop. The operative question is the degree to which all this coheres, and whether listeners from those respective camps will be jarred away by all the stylistic puddle-jumping.

Hagans has engineered many of the successive themes in the first movement to collapse into themselves, to heighten the tension. After a staggering intro, there are echo effects, call-and-response from droll to tense, and suspenseful, increasingly dense rising waves. Pianist Vladyslav Sendecki’s pedalpoint and then simple, climbing riffs anchor blazing brass, a trope that will return many, many times here. In between, he takes a loose-limbed, allusively chromatic solo, the orchestra slowly rising in bursts behind him and then subsiding. An acidic moodiness settles in from there.

Massed swells give way to busy chatter and then a catchy, circling riff from the reeds as the second movement moves along. Baritone saxophonist Daniel Buch – who gets an amazing, crystalline, clarinet-like tone in the upper registers – hovers and then squirrels around. A slow, confident, brassy chorus of sorts recedes for bassist Ingmar Heller’s spare, dancing solo out.

The third movement begins with a brief, discordant duet between Sendecki and Heller that gains momentum with a brassy squall and rises to a blazing quasi-swing. Tenor saxophonist Peter Bolte’s smoky solo followed by trombonist Stefan Lotterman’s precise, dry humor are the high points. The bandleader’s wryly dancing solo at the end offers welcome amusement as well.

Hagans’ command of microtonal inflections in his solo intro to the fourth movement is impressive, to say the least, echoed by alto saxophonist Fiete Felsch as a more-of-less steady sway develops in movement four. Full stop for a shift into a shiny, intricately interwoven clave groove followed by a bit of cartoonish cacaphony, sardonically coalescing variations and a spacy Mario Doctor percussion solo.

The suite concludes with a contented sunset theme of sorts, Hagans using his mute, fading down and suddenly shifting to a funky, latin-tinged drive, a momentary breakdown and an eventual return to the overlays of the initial movement.

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Tim Hagans Turns It Up at Birdland

Last night at Birdland jazz  trumpeter Tim Hagans played an intense, melody-packed cd release show for his latest one, The Moon Is Waiting, just out on Palmetto. Hagans chose his spots expertly: it was rare that he went more than a few bars before either handing over the lead, so to speak, to the other players, or letting the intensity sink in before kicking back in. While Freddie Hubbard at his peak circa Red Clay is an obvious influence, both in terms of tonal clarity and judiciously aggressive attack, Hagans has his own voice, as cerebral as it is tuneful. Alongside him, Vic Juris added a jaw-dropping variety of shades on electric guitar, with Rufus Reid magisterial, purist and occasionally lowdown and slyly funky on bass, drummer Jukkis Uotila propelling the group with one rapidfire cluster after another, and supplying vividly austere, otherworldly piano on one tune as well.

The first three songs on the album are a suite commissioned by a dance project: live in concert, despite their stylistic diversity, the physicality of the pieces translated dramatically. The opening track, Ornette’s Waking Dream of a Woman (title supplied by the head of the dance troupe) was more overtly extroverted, even joyous, than the edgily rhythmic, 70s noir-tinged version on the album. Likewise, the studio version of the title track is essentially a long, enjoyably suspenseful intro without any kind of resolution; live, it became a springboard for energetic, unwinding spirals from Hagans that gave the piece a swinging contrast with the endlessly flurrying, seemingly rubato rumbles of the rhythm section. Then they took it down for a cooly minimalist, soulful Reid solo, moving casually out of the depths to segue elegantly into the album’s third track, Get Outside, a mini-suite that gave Juris a chance to air out his rock side with a wryly crescendoing ascending progression as it wound out, lining up the dancers, metaphorically speaking, for a big blazing finale.

The album version of What I’ll Tell Her Tonight is loaded with subtext; here, it was delivered irony-free, simply a beautiful ballad with Hagans in cool, Miles Davis mode, Juris expertly using his volume knob to vary the tones emerging from the shadows. A briskly shuffling swing tune, First Jazz aptly illustrated a fifteen-year-old Hagans’ transformative moment realizing that trumpet was his calling, adrenalizing riff upon riff, Juris clearing a path with his brightly sustained jump-blues lines. Midway through the show, Hagans expressed an unselfconsciously genuine appreciation for a crowd who’d come out in support of music, and albums, as adventurous as his are. And the crowd gave it back to him. They wanted an encore, but didn’t get one: Phil Woods was next on the bill, and time was up.