New Classical Tracks: The risk and enlightenment of arranging

Claude Bolling - Symphonic Arrangement -Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio - Steve Barta, arranger; Hubert Laws, flute; Jeffrey Biegel, piano (Steve Barta Music)

Five hundred thirty weeks. That's about 10 years. A long time for any hit song to remain on the Billboard charts. It was even more remarkable when that chart-topping tune came from a composer who blended the worlds of jazz and classical music. In fact, Claude Bolling's Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio is partly responsible for coining the term "crossover" in music. This piece made such a big impression on musician and arranger Steve Barta 40 years ago he decided to create a new symphonic arrangement. "And I heard the suite first in 1975 when I was in school and absolutely fell in love with the piece," Barta explains. "When I first heard it, I loved the writing and I knew that at some point, I would touch this piece again, and sure enough, about 37 or 38 years later, I met Jeff Biegel and he had the same idea in mind to do a re-arrangement of the suite. And we got together and I sat down and wrote the arrangements and recorded it with Jeff on piano and Hubert Laws on flute and here we have a new arrangement and just a really, really different feel to it. You put Hubert Laws on flute on any project and it's going to change."

French jazz pianist and composer Claude Bolling made 13 "crossover" recordings for Columbia and CBS Masterworks. Each one featured a collaboration with a prominent classical artist like trumpeter Maurice André, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Pinchas Zukerman. It was Bolling's teamwork with Jean-Pierre Rampal on The Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio that produced his biggest hit.

So you might be wondering why Steve Barta, would risk reworking something that has such an amazing track record. "I thought the writing was brilliant, and it's still brilliant, but it just didn't have that edge of integrating it into jazz that I wanted to hear," Barta says. "It just felt a little too articulate for me. And then I brought in Mike Shapiro, a Brazilian drummer; Mike Valerio, a wonderful bassist; Hubert Laws and Jeff Biegel, and changed the feel all the way around on the piece.

"And you add string quartet to that and full orchestra and it's an arrangement that's really lovely. It's glorious," Barta continues. "It's got lots of textures, lots of color and you know it's interesting because a lot of people have written [to] me since they heard it and they write [to] me and they tell me, 'Boy, when I first heard you were going to rearrange this …' Their first reaction was, 'No, no, no — don't touch it, don't touch it!' And then when they hear the arrangement, they're going, 'Oh wow. It's really great.'"

Barta says composer Claude Bolling agrees the result is pretty great. "Claude had one request of me," Barta clarifies, "he said, 'You can go forth and you can do this, young man. But please do not rewrite the piece. Rearrange it and do what you will, what you hear in your head and in your heart about it but do not start to rewrite it.' And I really held true to that — I did not rewrite the piece. I arranged it and changed the feel and the overall sound of the piece, but his composition remains faithfully intact."

One thing that caught my ear right away was how Barta slowed down the tempo, and here's why: "Hubert sent me a clip of something he did with the Fugue on the Johnny Carson show years ago and it was so fast [see video below]," Barta recalls. "I said, 'Wow it's a great fugue, great writing. Slow it down so I can enjoy it and I can take it in.' So yeah, I did take the tempos for the most part and slowed them. And it just seems this way … I can take it in a little more, it's not zipping by so fast."

Of the seven movements that make up this album, Barta doesn't hesitate to call out his favorite. "Sentimentale speaks to me in a way that's just spiritual. It goes places harmonically, the feel … everything about it. One of the joys about putting this out and having people write back to me [is] they say, 'Every time I hear it, I hear something that I didn't hear before.' And it even happens to me — I'll say, 'Wow, I didn't … that's right, the oboe did that line and it crossed with the cellos,' and I hear things I didn't hear before."

While the third movement, the Javannaise, was incredibly easy to arrange, Barta admits his biggest obstacle was negotiating the tough waters of the finale. "I found the very last piece extremely challenging because of all the tempo changes," he says. "So many tempo changes, all of a sudden it swings the lines are very intricate. That was the one piece when I went into the recording session that I was hoping would go very, very well. If anything was going to go left — that piece was a little more challenging. But it didn't go left, it fell together perfectly. And probably, I would say, rhythmically one of the most interesting pieces on the recording. It's all over the board."

Putting your own stamp on a well-known work is always a little risky. And for Steve Barta it's also been enlightening. "I came out of this thinking maybe it's even harder to be an arranger than a composer," he reflects. "When you're composing it, it's just so easy. It comes to you and you lay it out. But when you're arranging, you're taking somebody else's work and certainly you're always hoping at the end of the day that the composer is going to speak to you again and continue to be your friend. And certainly Claude did like the arrangement very much."

And in case you're wondering: They are still friends.

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