Oregon Symphony

There is nothing quite so effective at reminding one of how much they love something as watching it being destroyed. Halfway through The Oregon Symphony’s highly ironic arrangement of Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” which opened the concert I went to last night, tears began streaming down my face. I have been brought to tears by music many times before, but these were not tears inspired by sublimity, these were tears for the dead. It’s not that I hadn’t been warned- the title of the concert was, after all, Soul of New Orleans. But there was no second line happening this night. This was nails being pounded tight enough into the coffin to ensure no soul would escape. After that first tragic song, the conductor, Jeff Tyzik, smugly quipped, “I can guarantee you’ve never heard that song played like that before. And I can guarantee there’s more of it to come!” And he was oh, so right.

The featured artist for the evening was a trumpeter/vocalist named Byron Stripling. His forte was witty between-song banter. And he thought he was really funny. As a musician, he was strikingly boring and conservative. He stuck to the melody, and the arrangements conveniently removed virtually all improvisation. In fact, he played all of one extended trumpet solo the entire evening, in “Honeysuckle Rose,” during which he had obviously no idea what to do whatsoever. He ended a full three measures short of the turnaround! His intonation was tight, avoiding blue notes and vibrato. He had an interesting habit of moving his pinky up and down- obviously pretending that there was a valve under it. “What a showman!” the middle-aged white people in attendance will say….

Before beginning one of the great classic blues songs of all time, Stripling did a routine overtly making fun of the blues. This was redundant, to be sure. What was the point of this concert? Why spend an evening going out of your way to ruin a truly original American classical art form? Why not just stick with playing Mozart and Elgar? While making fun of them, Stripling struggled to name some blues singers. He did come up with James Rushing. James Rushing? He is always called JIMMY Rushing! Even the guest musician had not bothered with getting an education in the true version of this music before dismissing it.

During the first set, they made a few ill-advised attempts at small group playing, but with the piano shoved practically off stage left, and the scattered trombonist and clarinetist, it was obvious that even if they had bothered to try listening to each other they wouldn’t really have been able to. There was also a guest drummer who was about as competent as a senior in any reasonably proficient high school jazz band. He was buried behind the violas with a plexi-glass screen in front of him, presumably because he can’t control his own dynamics or there’d be no such thing as getting him subdued enough.

The second set was to begin with “King Porter Stomp,” another of my favorite tunes. In his introduction, the conductor mentioned the Fletcher Henderson arrangement then bragged, “We don’t have Fletcher Henderson’s sax section, but he didn’t have OUR string section.” Oh, hell no! Fletcher Henderson assembled many of the greatest musicians of the 20’s and early 30’s to be in his highly innovative band and was probably the greatest arranger of all time, sacrificing his career as a bandleader to become Bennie Goodman’s full-time arranger. The Oregon Symphony is a bunch of hacks. I seriously wanted to punch Mr. Tyzik in the teeth.

As I scanned ahead on the program, I grimaced at anticipation of Flat Foot Floogie, because I knew this guy wasn’t going to be able to scat or was just going to act like a jackass while doing it. After all, he had already derided music with words you can’t understand. It did not escape me that the program misspelled Slim Gaillard’s name, nor did it pass me by lightly when Stripling referred to him as a “one-hit wonder.” Uh- hello? You’re seriously going to call a popular live entertainer and master of his idiom with a 40 year career a one-hit wonder? Stripling’s attempt at scat lived up to its name.

Up until the last one, every song had ended with the high tonic being held surprisingly short on the trumpet, followed by Stripling pumping his fist in the air at his own brilliance. It was forgivable that he didn't have Armstrong, Gillespie or Fergusen's range, but I doubted he had the ear to even play the fifth above or something interesting. Well, he finally went for it, but we'll never know what “it” was, because he flubbed it ENTIRELY. He quickly took the horn out of his mouth while grinning slyly as if he’d meant to do that. Is there any way to make a deal with the devil to trade this fucker’s soul for jazz back? Long live jazz; jazz is dead.