Tall Tales of Jasper County: Professor Releases New Jazz Album to Critical Acclaim

Dale Wilson is Associate Professor of Music and Co-Chair of the music department, but his musical labors are not limited to this campus. He also holds a place as composer, orchestrator and arranger in the professional world of jazz. His most recent album, Tall Tales of Jasper County: The Double Doubles Suite, was released this May by Inarhyme Records – an indie label based in Philadelphia, run and owned by the artist Keith Javors – in conjunction with the NDR (German Public Radio) Bigband of Hamburg, Germany. The album contains a suite of six pieces for jazz orchestra composed and arranged by Wilson. In the short time since its release, the album has earned acclaim: it was chosen as an “Editor’s Pick” by DownBeat Magazine in the month of its release, it was featured by JazzUSA.com and was much lauded in reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

When I met with Professor Wilson, we talked about the sort of creative work that goes into such a project. For just over 50 minutes of music, it took Wilson nine months to compose, arrange and polish these tunes.

The germ of this project was Wilson’s friendship with the Bigband’s lead alto saxophone player Fiete Felsch. The lead alto player of a jazz band is in a comparable position to the first violinist of a classical orchestra: not only a lead musician, but someone who, in Wilson’s words, has influence on the “aesthetic direction” of the group.

This sort of influence manifests itself, for instance, in Felsch’s initiative to bring Wilson in to compose for the group – a solo initiative on Felsch’s part, and a big nod to Wilson, who admits that he is not a “household name.” He had written smaller pieces for the band, so they knew he could swing. Felsch had earlier offered Wilson the chance to write a large-scale piece for the band, but Wilson was prevented from pursuing this “dream opportunity” by that foe of all creative work, quotidian business. But the offer remained, and Wilson took the opportunity of a semester of sabbatical leave to begin composing a big band suite that would feature Felsch as a soloist.

In a demonstration of generous artistry, Felsch envisioned that the best way to showcase his own talents was to share the solo spot with tenor saxophonist Lutz Büchner. Felsch and Büchner were unique musicians for this project because of their expertise on secondary instruments: clarinet for Büchner and piccolo, flute and alto flute for Felsch. While many instrumentalists have proficiency on multiple instruments – they can “double” – few have achieved the technical facility and fluency of improvisation to solo on their doubles like they can on their main instruments. Both of these musicians had this talent. Wilson’s music was designed to showcase the enviable skills of Felsch and Büchner. He wrote pieces that would allow both musicians to show their stuff on both their main instruments and their doubles: hence “The Double Doubles Suite.” The results of this inventive method, says DownBeat, are “stunning.”

Once the music was written, the NDR band flew Wilson into Germany for a week in January 2013 to record the music at their studios in Hamburg. Here he put on his fourth musical cap, that of conductor. In this role, his method was to give the ensemble’s 18 virtuoso artists full artistic license with his music. The album was released in May, and its first public performance was at the release party in New York City. Its next performance – its European debut – will take place in April of 2016 in Hamburg, when Wilson will return to Germany to wear his conductor’s cap for a live audience. (He will, I expect, be brushing up on his German until then.)

In our talk, Professor Wilson told me that this was the largest creative project he had taken on to date. It has been a high point in his career as an artist. He has been professionally involved in music since his early twenties, when he worked as an arranger for pop groups in Hong Kong. An arranger is the person who realizes the general framework of a composition in the context of a certain band or performance; this person uses artistic vision to give playable shape to an abstract composition.

When he came back to the States and enrolled in the jazz program at the University of North Texas, the oldest academic jazz program in the country, he began to write for large jazz ensembles. His previous success carried over to this genre, and as a student he was awarded the Gil Evans prize, an international competition for jazz composition, as well as an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, also for jazz composition. From this early success he has had regular commissions in the commercial arena, though these have gradually been replaced by projects for friends, like Jasper County. From his long and various experience, he identifies his compositional home as the big band. In this genre he has found a niche experimenting with orchestral colors, using his mastery of the jazz idiom to achieve singular effects in this genre.

When I asked him how his commercial work as a composer (arranger, orchestrator, director, conductor) affected his teaching, he said that the opportunity to work outside of school as a musician reminds him just how much music means to him. This work, he says, allows him to keep in view that, when it comes to music, “the passion is what it’s all about. When teaching, it’s hard to stay in touch with it when it remains in the abstract, as just a set of concepts or practices, when really it’s an emotional thing, for both myself and the students. This perspective lets me keep in view what John Blacking [Editor’s note: a renowned scholar in the field of ethnomusicology, in which field Wilson wears still another cap, and an academic gown] meant when he said that music is ultimately irreducible, that it’s an unknowable truth, because that’s how deep it is. If I were not a musician myself, I think I would be more tempted, as a scholar and teacher, to fall back on facile analyses, on stereotypes and truisms about music. When I’m working on a creative project that I know will come out as a finished product on the other end, that will be performed somewhere, it keeps me naïve and innocent and young in the respect that I’m just out there learning, and trying to get better.”

This resonant moment of intellectual improvisation showcased Wilson’s own talents as a doubler as he riffed on his commercial and teaching careers, shaping them with exactly the deep sincerity of feeling he describes into a coalescent counterpoint.

Check out his album, Tall Tales of Jasper County: the Double Doubles Suite, out now.

The album is available as a CD and on iTunes and Amazon.•