Big Band vs the Big White Screen
The acronym BJO resonates with promise. This is true if you happen to be thinking about a Hungarian big band. But this time it’s not the Budapest Jazz Orchestra but the Brussels Jazz Orchestra that will be delighting both eye and ear on November 19.
The Belgian BJO celebrated its twentieth birthday last year and looked back to what has been a rich career, during the course of which they have welcomed guests such as Maria Schneider, Kenny Werner, Dave Liebman, McCoy Tyner, David Linx, Maria João and Lee Konitz. Local stars who have played with the band include Philip Catherine and Bert Joris, and the results of these collaborations have been recorded on disc.
The Brussels Jazz Orchestra – and this is true of its Hungarian peer too – is firmly determined to look well beyond jazz standards and traditional arrangements from the swing era, so they regularly colour their programmes with their own arrangements, or those created especially for them. As a result, the specialist jazz paper DownBeat ranked them in 2004 as one of the top eight big bands in the world. Thanks to plaudits such as these, and not least their energetic playing style and the convincing individual achievements of their musicians, they are regularly celebrated at festivals and concert halls in Europe and the United States.
This big band steered by saxophonist and artistic director Frank Vaganée is now turning its back on both jazz standards and the customary concert style of performance – and not for the first time. In 2003 emerged the idea to work with the Royal Belgian Film Archive by providing a complete musical background for silent films. The first piece in the BJO vs The Big White Screen series was Big Cities in the Twenties, and for three years they had great success with their programme Piccadilly. This was only surpassed by the triumph of their music for the 2011 multi-Oscar winning film The Artist.
In autumn 2014 they set off on tour with the third edition of their silent film series, in which three films made between 1919 and 1920 get the BJO treatment courtesy of trombone player and composer Lode Mertens: the moving Pollyanna starring the American big draw of the time Mary Pickford. The other two films feature Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton's rival Harold Lloyd, The Eastern Westerner and Captain Kidd's Kids – the concert title is inspired by the two stars: The Sweetheart and the Daredevil. The musical accompaniment to the screened film is not just about replacing the usual honky-tonk with a more "colourful" sound; it also presents a bridge for the today's audiences between the world of a hundred years ago and the present.
Words by Barbara Bércesi, originally published in Fall 2014 issue of the Liszt Academy Concert Magazine.