Landrus’ “Synthesized” Ellington and Strayhorn

Cover of the album being discussed

This coming Friday Palmetto/Blueland will release an album featuring Brian Landrus entitled Brian Landrus Plays Ellington & Strayhorn. As is almost always the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. This is a fourteen-track album with four compositions by Duke Ellington and  four by Billy Strayhorn. The remaining six tracks were jointly composed.

Landrus is joined by three other musicians on the album. These are guitarist Dave Stryker, Jay Anderson on bass, and drummer Billy Hart. The astute reader will notice that I have not invoked the noun “quartet,” because it is not, strictly speaking, accurate. Landrus himself plays all sizes of saxophones, clarinets, and flutes, often bringing them together in different combinations that reflect the moods behind the individual tracks. In other words the album is the product of synthesis, rather than performance.

This is probably when I should caution purists on the brink of tearing their hair out. To those of that ilk, I can only cite the most famous sentence from Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: “For those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.” While my personal preferences tend to run strongly in favor of the spontaneity of performance, I tend not to dismiss the results of synthesis out of hand. Usually, this is just a matter of “repairing glitches.” However, Landrus has gone far beyond worrying about glitches; and I would not be surprised to learn that, somewhere in the course of his development, he became acquainted with many of the “synthetic” practices of musique concrète. However, in his case synthesis is not a matter of inventing new sonorities. HIs only goal is to cultivate a choir of wind instruments, and his recording skills allow him to account for all the voices in that choir.

From a personal point of view, I think what matters most is that Landrus has “responded” to the “call” of Ellington. That “call” concerns the rich blends of winds and brass that one looks forward to hearing on just about any Ellington track. The good news is that Landrus has not tried to mimic the many blends that can be found in the plethora of Ellington recordings. Landrus decidedly has blends of his own. I may not warm up to all of them, but he deserves to be acknowledged for his own unique take on the Ellington-Strayhorn songbook.