Dutch Jazz Orchestra

The Dutch Jazz Orchestra: Rediscovered Music of Mary Lou Williams

by Edward Blanco
March 31, 2006

The Dutch Jazz Orchestra is known for performing the obscure and neglected works of better-known composers, arrangers and bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Billy Strayhorn, and Gerry Mulligan. With this album, the group continues its historic mission by unearthing and reviving the music of Mary Lou Williams. One of the few women in jazz who found her calling as a writer and educator, Williams is credited with composing and arranging for many musicians and big bands, including the Ellington ...

The Dutch Jazz Orchestra: Rediscovered Music of Mary Lou Williams

by Bob Jacobson
February 25, 2006

Thankfully, Mary Lou Williams' music has been getting “rediscovered" quite a bit over the past few years through reinvestigation of her sacred works, as well as her own solo and small group performances, plus interpretation/tributes by small groups led by Dave Douglas, John Hicks and Geri Allen. Now the Dutch Jazz Orchestra has given us Williams' big band arrangements of her own compositions covering the vast span from 1936-78 on this release, subtitled “The Lady Who Swings the Band."

Particularly ...

The Dutch Jazz Orchestra: Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn

by Jack Bowers
April 2, 2003

The fourth in the Dutch Jazz Orchestra’s series of albums devoted to songs composed and/or arranged by Billy Strayhorn focuses primarily on music written by Strayhorn for the theatre, beginning with the few surviving pieces from the concise show Fantastic Rhythm, produced around 1935, shortly after Strayhorn was graduated from high school. Also included are four songs written in 1953 for a surrealist play by Federico García Lorca, The Love of Don Perlimplim for Belisa in Their Garden, three of ...

The Dutch Jazz Orchestra: So This Is Love: More Newly Discovered Works of Billy Strayhorn

by Jack Bowers
March 2, 2003

Billy Strayhorn composed so many wonderful songs that even his employer, the indefatigable Duke Ellington, was unable to keep pace and record them all. A number of those precious treasures have been reclaimed from undeserved obscurity by musicologist Walter van de Leur and the world-class Dutch Jazz Orchestra, which here performs seventeen of Strayhorn’s previously unrecorded works--including three that were written before Billy left Pittsburgh in 1938 to become Ellington’s chief arranger and alter ego.

This is the DJO's second ...

The Dutch Jazz Orchestra: You Go to My Head: Billy Strayhorn and Standards

by Jack Bowers
January 2, 2003

The ballad component of the Great American Songbook has seldom sounded better than it does on this marvelous collaboration between the superlative Dutch Jazz Orchestra and the brilliant composer / arranger Billy Strayhorn, who wrote these exquisite charts for the Duke Ellington Orchestra over two decades beginning in the early ’40s. Eight of the arrangements are presented here for the first time, with four others preserved solely on hard-to-find radio broadcasts, and only two -- “Where or When” and “Lover ...

The Dutch Jazz Orchestra / Jerry Van Rooijen: You Go To My Head

by C. Michael Bailey
May 1, 2002

His mother called him Bill...the arranger

Dayton, Ohio-native William Thomas Strayhorn tooled around forever in the shadow of Duke Ellington. But is that so bad? Truly one of the greatest collaborations in jazz, the Strayhorn/Ellington alliance produced a mountain of standards for the jazz repertoire. Strayhorn alone was credited with composing Ellington's theme ("Take the A Train") and several other Ellington-book war-horses ("Lush Life", “Passion Flower," “UMMG," “Blood Count," and the list goes on).

A bigger part of Strayhorn's ...