What happy music this is! Besides inheriting first-rate jazz sensibilities from his father, Dave, Chris Brubeck appears to have a similar bubbly delight in melody that emerges from crisp, imaginative rhythmic patterns. True to its name, Convergence is a musical mixing of many elements: A folk dance in Balkan rhythms (shades of Blue Rondo à la Turk!); a Satchmo-like trumpet blues; a marching band that somehow sounds like a New Orleans funeral procession in 7/4. It all works and it’s all fun.
Paul Freeman has made many important contributions to American music. His two performances on this disc surely will count as stand-out efforts. One of his specialties is getting Central European orchestras to play American music like they were Americans, and he surpasses himself, energizing and swinging the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. Not only here but also in the Prague Concerto (Brubeck’s second concerto for trombone) the orchestral contribution is fluent and idiomatic, easily coping with both works’ considerable diversity of influence.
Brubeck, the bass trombone soloist in the concerto, is an outstanding player. Besides brash energy in the outer movements, he exhibits sensitivity in the middle movement. There this naturally dominant instrument must gently emerge from softly glowing strings to join a trio (flute, bassoon, and horn) playing from a rear balcony. The textures here are truly inventive and make the listener grateful for the SACD’s natural-sounding surround recording.
Setting off these two very strong works is a much more gentle six-part song cycle called River of Song. It contains five poems from the book River of Words, written by talented elementary school pupils, and a concluding wistful E. E. Cummings poem. Sara Jobin conducts the Tassajara Symphony, an ensemble from a small city in California. The playing here is not as self-assured as that of the Prague orchestra, and there also are moments of vocal strain from each of the soloists, but this is no reason to disfavor the recording. To the contrary, I count it as one of the most musically solid and entertaining one-composer collections I’ve heard for a good while, and recommend it very highly.
