Jazz InSpirations Ensemble Play a Truly Inspired Fusion of Jazz, Classical and Klezmer at Organ Pavilion June 24

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 24) my husband Charles and I went to an unusual concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featuring a French-Canadian group called the Jazz InSpirations Ensemble (that’s how it’s spelled on the Spreckels Organ Society’s Web site). I had assumed this would be a concert with the Spreckels Organ’s music director, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, horning his way onto the organ console and inserting himself into a jazz group that normally plays either without an organ at all or with the combination of a Hammond B-3 electric organ and Leslie speakers Jimmy Smith made the standard setup for jazz and rock organists everywhere. Wrong on both counts: not only is the band led by an organist, Jean-Willy Kurz, their regular instrumentation calls for a pipe organ – which means they can only play in venues that have one already. The other members of the band are André Moisan on clarinet, Hélène Lemay on trombone, Frédéric Alarie on bass and Francis Gaulin on drums. They sold a recording, made in 2014 at the Symphony Hall in their native Montréal, in which drummer/percussionist Paul Picard appeared instead of Gaulin but the personnel was otherwise the same, and everything on the record was also played last night except for the album’s last song, Sidney Bechet’s “Petite Fleur” (“little flower”). They’re advertised as a fusion of classical and jazz, but it would be more accurate to say classical, jazz and klezmer, the clarinet-driven Jewish folk music which had a brief revival of popularity in the early 1980’s. When I first heard klezmer I remember thinking, “So that’s where Benny Goodman came from! The parts of his style he didn’t rip off of Black New Orleans clarinetists came from the folk music of his own people – duh!”

The first piece the Jazz InSpirations played last night was a jazz arrangement by Michael Garson and Eddie Daniels of the 24th and last of Paganini’s Caprices for Unaccompanied Violin, and throughout Moisan’s solo I was thinking, “Ah, Benny Goodman at his most klezmer-ish.” Later items on the program made it clear that the InSpirations’ drawings on klezmer were quite deliberate. The next item on the program was a traditional Balkan folk song called “Grana od Bora,” with an arrangement credited to Jean-Willy Kurz and something called the “Bojan Z Quartet.” Then they played a straightforward jazz version of Chick Corea’s “Spain” (based on a traditional Spanish folk song also used by John Coltrane for his extended piece “Olé”) and afterwards did yet another tribute to klezmer. This was a piece called “Shalom Aleichem” by Béla Kovács, which began with André Moisan playing an unaccompanied version of the famous clarinet glissando that opens George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. He explained that Gershwin had drawn on klezmer and other Jewish folk traditions when he wrote this (though in fact Gershwin had written the passage as just a simple scalar progression of 17 notes, and it was Ross Gorman, clarinetist for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra that gave the work’s premiere, who decided to make it a glissando instead – and Gershwin was so impressed he changed the score to require the glissando). Moisan explained to the audience that many seemingly “wrong” notes in the Kovács piece actually derived from the klezmer tradition, and later on in the evening he played another piece with klezmer roots: “Pour mon ami Léon” by Daniel Mercure, a tribute to a friend who was dying young but expressed gratitude for the beautiful music he’d been able to play on earth during the time he’d had.

Following the Kovács, which apparently was written for a violinist who’d been with the Israel Philharmonic for 30 years and then retired and concentrated on klezmer for the rest of his career, Jean-Willy Kurz played a solo organ transcription of the final five minutes or so of Rhapsody in Blue. It was nice enough, but I wish a) he could have performed the whole piece, and b) it could have been arranged as an organ-clarinet duo starting off with Moisan’s stunning rendition of the famous opening. Then came a jazz arrangement of a pop song with an intriguing history: it was originally written by Bart Howard in 1954 as “In Other Words,” and under that title it was recorded by Peggy Lee, Kaye Ballard and Felicia Sanders. (Lee’s version is on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9J1-ReetZo). Then Frank Sinatra got hold of it and decided to perform it on his second album with Count Basie, but he sped up the tempo from ballad to swing, omitted the song’s verse and ordered its title changed to “Fly Me to the Moon.” The Jazz InSpirations restored the song’s verse (which Lee had sung but Ballard hadn’t), eloquently phrased on trombone by Hélène Lemay, and after performing the verse in ballad tempo turned the piece, not into the straight-ahead 4/4 swing Sinatra and Basie had used, but into a waltz. For the end of their first set they tweaked their printed program a bit and played Paul Desmond’s jazz standard “Take Five,” though they played an arrangement by Hélène Lemay and one R. Prévost that retitled it “Time Out” – ironically, the name of the Dave Brubeck album on which Desmond originally recorded “Take Five.” After a brief intermission, during which Raúl Prieto Ramírez came out and presented an organ scholarship certificate to 11-year-old Yuhan Jackson, the band returned with another of their quirky rearrangements of well-known classical pieces: in this case, the opening movement of Mozart’s 40th Symphony.

Then they played a medley of “In Spirit,” a bass introduction written and played by Frédéric Alarie, and “Impressions,” a famous 1961 jazz piece by John Coltrane. After another Jean-Willy Kunz organ solo, this one on Joseph Kozma’s 1950’s French pop song “Autumn Leaves” (originally “Les feuilles mortes” – “The leaves of death”), the band returned for one of the Four Pieces from New York by Italian composer Roberto Molinelli, “Pour mon ami León” by Daniel Mancure (mentioned above), and “Guataca City” by Paquito d’Rivera, a Cuban-American saxophonist and clarinetist. The overall sound of the InSpirations Ensemble reminded me of two other bands heavily featuring their clarinetists: the Australian Jazz Quartet of the 1950’s and the Russian Jazz Quartet of the 1960’s. All three bands prominently featured their clarinetists, and all tended towards haunting dark-sounding musical colors. The name “Russian Jazz Quartet” was a misnomer because by the time the members were able to defect to the West, only two of them – Boris Midney on clarinet and Igor Berukshitis on bass – were still on board and they had to recruit two Americans, pianist Roger Kellaway and drummer Grady Tate, to fill out the band. They Jazz InSprations Ensemble were quite an engaging group even though they suffered just a bit from sounding stiff. My husband Charles thought that they strait-jacketed themselves so much by their arrangements there was little or no room left to improvise. I’ve certainly seen and heard more exciting jazz concerts, but this one was a pleasant evening and often quite a bit more than that. Generally, their walks on the folk wild side were more interesting than their forays into jazz, which were good but lacked the edgy excitement of the best live jazz performances. Still, it was an excellent night at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, and next Monday, July 1, there’ll be a Fourth of July concert with the excellent pop organist Jelani Eddington playing other things besides patriotic standards (though there’ll be plenty of those, too!)