Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra With Wynton Marsalis
‘Hot Jazz and Swing’
Rose Hall, Through September 21
Streaming Through September 27

Jazz at Lincoln Center on Thursday night launched its 20th season at Rose Hall with a fairly spectacular concert, which helped illuminate precisely what makes the JALC organization so unique. 

Let’s just say that if virtually any other presenter was offering a show of music from the swing era, it would inevitably begin with Duke Ellington’s “Take the A-Train” and conclude with Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Along the way we’d hear a program featuring such other great but over-familiar chestnuts as Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood” and Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump.” 

Instead, Loren Schoenberg, who has long been associated with JALC as well as Juilliard and is the founder of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, served as musical director and host for a program that steadfastly refused to round up the usual suspects. It should be stressed that these were not obscure or lesser-known works — nearly all with an interest in this music will know most of them — but just the same, they are amazing pieces that are almost never performed live in concert.

Mr. Schoenberg and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra began with “Mary’s Idea,” by the visionary Mary Lou Williams originally for Andy Kirk’s band at Kansas City; it was a prescient choice in that Williams was a key figure both in the development of the classic swing band format in the early ’30s and then also in the birth of bebop a decade later.  

They followed with another futurist work, “The Lonesome Road,” arranged by Bill Finegan in 1939 for Tommy Dorsey, which was one of many tunes that sounded like it could have been from 10 or more years later than it actually was — not least because of what was then considered its epic length, all of six minutes, requiring both sides of a standard 78 RPM disc.

Even though this was Finegan’s first major piece to be recorded, he was already a master, doling out portions of the melody here and there, interspersing it with improvised solos and section passages — the saxes, for instance — and traveling down the tune as if, indeed it were a kind of road, though, admittedly hardly from a lonesome one.

That seems to have been one of the themes of the evening: outlier-type pieces that didn’t sound typical of the era. Even “Blue Skies,” arranged by Fletcher Henderson for Benny Goodman, was radical in 1935: it sounds familiar to us because every band for the next 10 years ran with that basic idea — a hard-swinging 4/4 dance-friendly arrangement of what was already a standard — but at that time, the majority of Americans had never heard anything like it, unless they had been to Harlem or Kansas City.  

Sy Oliver’s “For Dancers Only” might be deemed stealth radicalism: Its harmonic voicings are truly innovative, and its rhythm is like nothing heard before it. Yet while you’re listening, you’re too busy dealing with the overwhelming urge to dance to pay attention to any musicological specifics. The orchestra’s Obed Calvaire did an excellent job of nailing the unique beat of the Jimmie Lunceford band — what Anita O’Day once called a “Lunceford two” — which is utterly unlike anyone else’s concept of the two-beat.  

All of these pieces were written essentially for dancers only, which testifies to the advanced terpsichorean skills of your average individual in this period; Ellington’s “The Flaming Sword” was both a conga and a very new rhythm north of the equator in 1940, and in 5/4 no less — and yet people were apparently able to dance to it.  

Mr. Schoenberg and JALC’s artistic director, Wynton Marsalis, are to be commended for their concept of “casting,” in that nearly all the clarinet solos were by Chris Lewis, who stood in handily for Goodman, Artie Shaw, and many others. Likewise the tenor solos by Abdias Armenteros, which contributes to the notion that this is a real orchestra, not just a proxy for something else. 

The alto saxophone soloists were Sherman Irby, in the role of Johnny Hodges on “Warm Valley,” and Alexa Tarrantino, in her first season with the JALCO, as Don Redman on his own “Chant of the Weed.” (As the late Rich Conaty observed, “Apparently all the guys in that band were into gardening.”)

The JALCO also presented two first-rate singers, both of whom shouted the blues in the first half. The young Shenel Johns entered in a bright, shiny silver gown, with “Why Don’t You Do Right,” phrasing it more legato than Peggy Lee in the 1942 hit record, and the veteran Kurt Elling, in a less shiny silver gray suit, declaimed “Sent For You Yesterday” in the considerable footsteps of Jimmy Rushing.  

In the second half, they obliged with two ballads, she with “Sentimental Journey” and he with Billy Strayhorn’s eternally exotic treatment of “Flamingo,” which sounds just as far-out 80-plus years later as it did in 1940.

It was especially rewarding to hear two arrangements by Eddie Sauter for Artie Shaw, rarely played perhaps because they require a full six saxophones — Messrs. Irby, Lewis, and Armenteros, Ms. Tarantino, and baritone saxophonist Paul Nedzilla were joined by Peter Anderson, who had just performed as half of the Anderson Brothers in a tribute to Benny Goodman the night before at Dizzy’s down the hall.  

It was worth the extra effort: “Summertime” featured trumpeter Kenny Rampton growling into a mute à la Roy Eldridge, who was actually not known for his muted playing. He also performed on “The Maid with the Flaccid Air,” in which both the title and the tune were inspired by Debussy, which somehow managed to be both swinging and impressionistic at the same time.

It was a bang-up opener for the 2024-’25 season, one of the best I can remember — and I’ve been attending nearly all their concerts since the beginning. It’s also a welcome sign of the times that the orchestra now regularly includes female musicians, most often saxophonist Camille Thurman and Ms. Tarantino.

When the orchestra first started, Mr. Marsalis was one of the younger members. Now, about to turn 63, Mr. Marsalis is probably the oldest player in the band, and I only know that because I’m a month older than he is.