The Vinny Golia Large Ensemble
20th Anniversary Concert
Nine Winds NWDVD250
2005

There was a time when there existed a clear delineation between jazz and classical musicians. More than simply a matter of repertoire, it had much to do with the fact that the raison d'être of jazz musicians was improvisation, while that of classical musicians was of interpretation. A fine line? Perhaps. But early experiments that brought musicians from both worlds together often failed because the jazz players were unable to work within the more rigid compositional confines of through-composed music, while classical players' attempts at improvisation sounded, at the very least, unconvincing.

But as music as a whole has ventured farther away from demarcation, so too have musicians found themselves living in many worlds. Many classical players—especially those who work with more contemporary repertoires—are now proving themselves to be imaginative improvisers. Jazz musicians can now be found comfortably crossing over into not only working with classical repertoire, but writing their own pieces that live in a similar ideological space. It's the appeal of free improvisation within a modernistic large-scale compositional framework that has broken down barriers to the point where, for many, they simply no longer exist.

Woodwind multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia has been living in the space where form and freedom coexist since 1971, when he gave up painting to devote himself to music full-time. In the ensuing years he's been something of a galvanizer to more than one generation of American West Coast musicians who are similarly attracted to dissolving the artificial borders of musical genres. Golia's projects have ranged from solos to duos including last year's The Entire Time with guitarist Nels Cline to small group encounters like this year's live One, Three, Two. But as unerringly adventurous as all his music has been, it's his Large Ensemble that's perhaps represented his most fearless combination of the tonal with the atonal, the rhythmic with the arrhythmic, and the melodic with the purely textural.

Since forming the ensemble in 1982, when it began as a fourteen-piece ensemble, it's grown not only in size and scope, but in musical aspiration. Make no mistake. This is not a jazz big band. The 35-piece incarnation of The Vinny Golia Large Ensemble, represented on the recently-released 20th Anniversary Concert DVD, is a chamber orchestra, but one where everyone is as comfortable extemporizing as they are following complex structure. The Ensemble is a veritable who's who of the Left Coast scene, including charter members Wayne Peet (keyboards); Alex Cline (percussion); John Fumo (trumpet) and Mike Vlatkovich (trombone) alongside more recent enlistees like Cryptogramophone label owner Jeff Gauthier (violin), Brad Dutz (percussion), Bruce Fowler (trombone), PfMENTUM label owner Jeff Kaiser (trumpet, flugelhorn), Scot Ray (trombone) and Bill Roper (tuba, spoken word). Many of these players are leaders in their own right, and the ensemble has a collective resume that's almost infinite in size and musical scope.

The 100-minute performance that makes up the lion's share of the DVD comes from a 2002 performance that features half a dozen recent Golia compositions. What is remarkable is the way that conductor Marc Lowenstein manages to maintain order within the potential chaos of improvisational sections that range from individual soloing to collective section free-play. While certain passages are strictly composed while others are more open-ended, the challenge for much of the performance is to determine who is engaged in pursuit of form as opposed to those being given free reign.

With the number of instruments at his disposal, there runs the risk of excessive density, and to be sure, parts of the performance are cacophonous maelstroms of sound. But from passages where everyone is in the pool at once emerge smaller subsections, including an outré organ spot from Peet around the 45-minute mark—apparently during "The Long Short Nite, but with the set running continuously, it's only thanks to the included notes that you'd ever know—that represents, however briefly, one of a few points in the set that actually swing in any kind of traditional sense.

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