Springfield Symphony Jazz Orchestra,Royalty Review

by Icrom Bigrad

Springfield Symphony Jazz Orchestra is an ensemble that takes an inherited musical language and makes it sound like something being spoken rather than recited. That language sits at the core of Royalty, the Springfield Symphony Jazz Orchestra’s first studio recording. Its twelve selections make the historical coordinates clear: Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Frank Foster, and Neal Hefti provide much of the repertoire, while the orchestra’s emphasis on swing places Ellington- and Count Basie-associated big-band language at the center of the album.

The distance of the music from its history is the grounding sound. SSJO performs riffs with the characteristic blues overtones, the quarter note swings, brass and reeds answer one another, blues language remains fundamental, and sectional voicings carry the colors of classic large-ensemble jazz. What keeps those devices from becoming acts of reproduction is how the musicians use them. Throughout Royalty, musical information passes between sections, rhythm players, soloists, and singers. A riff becomes an answer; a background becomes counterpoint; a change of register alters an arrangement’s weight; a rhythmic figure moves from one part of the orchestra to another. The vocabulary is inherited, but its use is immediate.

“Second Line” reveals the elaborate layered sound of the big band. A buoyant bass sound, bouncing piano, and clarinet establish the character before the arrangement begins opening outward. The drums move from hi-hat to ride, additional horns enter, and the music accumulates activity without sacrificing the swing underneath it. Brass and reeds interact rather than simply occupying assigned blocks of an arrangement, while blues-oriented melodic language gives the growing complexity a common center.

The writing itself helps explain why so much activity remains intelligible. Independent horn lines have melodic identities while simultaneously creating larger harmonic shapes. Bebop-derived figures and resolutions appear within those lines, while pedal tones and more compact sectional voicings provide contrast. When the form enters darker harmonic territory, the orchestration darkens with it. Form, harmony, and instrumental color operate together rather than as separate layers.

Most important, ideas move. Rhythmic material passes through the orchestra. Background figures respond beneath solos. Counterlines accumulate around the clarinet, and the shout chorus increases the density without ending the exchange between soloist and ensemble. Later, the process reverses: repeating material remains while layers disappear, muted brass lowers the temperature, and George Delancey’s walking bass keeps the music moving underneath. From there, the ensemble rebuilds toward its final cadence.

The result is sections and motifs are made legible through interaction. SSJO does not achieve clarity by reducing the number of events; it makes the relationships among those events audible.

That becomes especially important when singers enter the orchestra. On “No Moon at All,” Kurt Elling changes the hierarchy of the arrangement without breaking its underlying language. Brass stabs and woodwind responses establish the setting, but Elling’s phrasing soon becomes the primary source of movement. His blues-oriented delivery grows more forceful as he climbs in register, while the orchestra remains active around him. A guide-tone line in the brass and rhythmic saxophone figures maintain independent motion without obscuring the vocal melody.

By the later passages, Elling’s sustained shakes take on an almost horn-like character. When the performance settles into a vamp, he moves lower and begins riffing on the lyric. Singer and orchestra are no longer functioning simply as melody plus accompaniment; each is shaping what the other can do next.

Ekep Nkwelle’s performance on “You Turned the Tables on Me” demonstrates the other side of that relationship. Her relaxed, sensual delivery requires space, and the orchestra gives it to her. She plays with the placement of phrases against the medium swing, alternates legato lines with more pointed staccato articulation, and colors the melody with blues inflections. The arrangement answers without crowding her. Call-and-response eventually becomes explicit, while a brief move into a quarter-note-triplet feeling bends the rhythmic shape of a phrase before the underlying swing reasserts itself.

Together, the two vocal performances expose an important quality in the orchestra. Ensemble responsiveness is not synonymous with constant activity. Sometimes it means adding a line or answering a phrase; sometimes it means recognizing how much room another musician needs.

“Every Day I Have the Blues,” featuring Elling with guest drummer Jeff Hamilton, puts that principle inside an even more familiar framework. Blues repetition can quickly expose whether an ensemble is developing material or merely moving through choruses. Here, repetition becomes the condition that makes development easy to hear.

Stride-inflected piano establishes the character before the full orchestra enters, and call-and-response quickly becomes central. Saxophone phrases occupy the spaces around Elling’s singing while muted and plunger-colored brass contribute another layer of blues vocabulary. Yet successive choruses do not simply repeat the arrangement. Their personalities change through orchestration, rhythm, register, and phrasing.

Elling begins with the authority of his lower register and gradually increases the expressive pressure. Embellishments lengthen or contract; blue notes become more pronounced; glissandos stretch between pitches; higher-register phrases intensify the narrative. The orchestra develops alongside him, changing backgrounds and introducing increasingly forceful ensemble figures until the band moves decisively into the foreground for the final build.

The form provides stability rather than limitation. Because everyone knows where the blues is, the musicians can continually change what happens inside it.

Frank Foster’s “Who Me” reduces the same principle to some of big-band jazz’s most fundamental materials: riff, quarter note, walking bass, sectional exchange, and dynamics. The opening riff passes between parts of the orchestra before the sections converge, while familiar bebop gestures appear inside the horn writing. Beneath them, Delancey and the drums keep the quarter-note motion central.

Individual voices emerge from that collective foundation. An expressive plunger-trumpet solo pushes toward the unrulier edges of the sound while retaining crisp rhythmic definition. During the piano feature, blues language and upper-extension arpeggios sit over the audible chunk of Kevin Turner’s Freddie Green-style guitar pulse. The historical vocabulary is unmistakable, but it functions as shared musical information rather than scenery.

Then the orchestra demonstrates how much development can come from dynamics and orchestral density. The ensemble contracts toward a near-whisper, with woodwinds leading the texture while guitar, bass, and light piano activity maintain motion underneath. Gradually the sound expands. The voicings widen, dynamics increase, trumpet activity supplies upper-register brilliance, and the orchestra arrives at its final rhythmic and cadential gesture with the full weight of the ensemble restored.

That movement between collective precision and individual expression is central to Royalty. Director Todd Stoll leads a multigenerational orchestra whose personnel spans Mark Donavan, Chris Andrews, Hal Melia, Edwin Bayard, and Lauren Elliott Burgess in the reeds; Scott Belck, Pharez Whitted, Timothy Blackmon Jr., Miles Smith, Larry Griffin, and Stoll in the trumpets; Jessica Sneeringer, Lexi Hamner, and Kie Watkins in the trombones; and pianists Christopher Brown and Joel Wenhardt, guitarist Turner, bassist Delancey, and drummer Maria Marmarou in the rhythm section. Guests Jeff Hamilton, Elling, and Nkwelle enter that ensemble identity rather than displacing it.

The importance of those musicians in a large group reproducing the articulation and sonority associated with this repertoire. It is that the players share enough of its language to react to one another from inside it.

That clarifies what tradition means on Royalty. The Ellington- and Basie-associated vocabulary is not valuable simply because it belongs to the past, nor does SSJO need conspicuous modernization to establish its relevance. Swing articulation, blues phrasing, riffs, sectional voicings, counterpoint, dynamics, and call-and-response remain useful because they still provide ways to organize collective musical thought.

Royalty ultimately makes inheritance an active process. SSJO knows the grammar as the musicians speak through it, and, more importantly, speak to one another.