Jazzing the Classics with Sax and Bassoon

Frank Morelli and Keith Oxman (along with their instruments) on the cover of their new album

The last time I wrote about tenor saxophonist Keith Oxman was shortly after COVID-19 lockdown had been imposed at the end of March of 2020. Capri Records had recently released his latest album, Two Cigarettes in the Dark, which featured another tenor saxophonist, Houston Person, as “guest artist.” Tomorrow Capri will release another album, this one entitled The Ox-Mo Incident. For those that cannot wait, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

For those of us with an appreciation of American literature and cinematic history, the album title may not be as playful as Oxman probably intended. The Ox-Bow Incident is a novel written in 1940 by Walter Van Tilburg Clark about mob rule that results in hanging three innocent men. It was turned into a film in 1943 and was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards but lost the prize to Casablanca.

Fortunately, The Ox-Mo Incident is “something completely different.” Like Two Cigarettes in the Dark, Oxman is one of two leaders and is the “Ox” in the album title. “Mo,” on the other hand, is bassoonist Frank Morelli. It is hard enough to encounter serious jazz for bassoon from any source other than Gil Evans, let alone crediting the bassoonist with both arrangements and solo leadership. This “duo of equals” is supported by a rhythm section that includes Jeff Jenkins on piano and Ken Walker on bass (both of whom provided rhythm for Two Cigarettes in the Dark), as well as Todd Reid on drums.

Most of the tracks on this album involve jazz reflections on classical sources. There is nothing new about efforts to popularize the classics. After all, all of the songs in the musical Kismet, first performed in 1953 on Broadway, are based on themes by Alexander Borodin; and two of those songs, “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” and “Stranger in Paradise,” are included on this album, arranged jointly by both Oxman and Morelli. However, the credits provided by the track listing are not always thorough. The best example of a “sin of omission” can be found on “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” whose theme comes from the third movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 18 (second) piano concerto in C minor; but at the very end of the track Oxman clearly cannot resist a distinct nod to the bassoon solo that opens Igor Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring.”

There is one connection that the track listing appears to have overlooked. “Three for five” (which definitely gets top marks for cleverness as a title), is based on the waltz-like theme (actually in 3/8 time) in the key of C minor from the third movement of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 90 (third) symphony in F major. This theme was sung by Diahann Carroll in the film Goodbye Again with lyrics by Dory Langdon (who would later become Dory Previn). In the European release, the title of the film was Aimez-vous Brahms? (do you love Brahms), since the script was based on a novel with that title by Françoise Sagan.

The album also includes two Oxman originals. One of these is the title track. The other is “A Wasp in Search of a Hart and Lung,” a title that demands a fair amount of personal information about Oxman before it can be unpacked. The performance, on the other hand. served as a welcome reminder of Oxman’s imaginative skills in a genre that may easily be called “latter-day bebop.” I would not even begin to guess what he has in mind for his next album.