Classic jazz big bands became famous in the 20s of the last century. They kept the shape relevant until the late 40s. Entering a big band as a teenager, the musician occupied a strictly designated place, becoming part of the group. Numerous rehearsals and careful orchestrations are the reason for the incredibly coherent, beautiful and loud sound.

Performers

Big bands originated in the 1920s and were relevant until the early 50s. Musicians who joined the group in adolescence, played strictly defined parts, memorizing them to the point of automatism. Add to this careful orchestration with sections of wood and brass instruments and you get what big bands were so highly prized for - the big band sound - rich jazz harmonies, sensationally loud sound.

This music reached its peak 10 years after its inception, by the mid-30s of the 20th century, thanks to the craze for dancing and swing. It was then that the stars of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Jimmy Lunsford, Charlie Barnett and other leaders rose jazz orchestras. It was they who composed and recorded a real hit parade of melodies that are popular in dance clubs and radio broadcasting. During the “battles of the orchestras,” when the bands demonstrated their best improvisers, the audience reached a truly hysterical state.

Big bands lost much of their popularity after World War II. But some orchestras continued to tour and continued to record for several more decades. However, their music can no longer be attributed to the classical understanding of the big band style, since it has been transformed under the influence of time and new directions. The ensembles of Sun Ra, Charles Mangus, Boyd Bayburn and other “star” leaders were exploring new movements, instrumentation, approaches to harmony and improvisation. Today, big bands are the standard of jazz education; the groups of Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall are known throughout the world. More information about the golden jazz bands of the 20-60s of the last century can be found in George Simon’s book “Big Orchestras of the Swing Era,” which was published in Russian in 2008.

Artistic director and conductor Vladimir Tolkachev, Honored Artist of Russia
Team Manager Victor Tregubov

About the team

The orchestra was created in 1985 from students of the Novosibirsk State Conservatory. For several years it was called Eurosib International. Since 1994, the orchestra has been part of the Novosibirsk State Philharmonic.

The team works in a variety of genres. One of the areas of his activity is free-form music - these are V. Tolkachev’s 40-minute variations on the theme of J. Gershwin “Summertime”, “Concerto for Orchestra” by V. Chekasin. The big band also carries out major projects: staging a jazz concert version of J. Gershwin's opera “Porgy and Bess” with American singers, a choir and a string orchestra; the first performance in Russia of Ellington-Strayhorn's Shakespeare Suite; performance of a program from works by Glazunov and Stravinsky with the participation of musicians of the academic symphony orchestra; jazz versions of “West Side Story” with string orchestra and Chamber Choir and music from the ballet “The Nutcracker” transcribed by Duke Ellington; Ellington's Second Sacred Concert; musical “De-Lovely”, program “Songs of Frank Sinatra”, etc.

The big band took part in more than 30 international jazz festivals: Pori and Imatra (Finland), Montreux (Switzerland), Vienne and Megeve (France), Hanover (Germany); performed twice for 4 evenings in Paris at the famous jazz club Lionel Hampton.

Famous soloists performed with the group: Bobby Watson, Donald Harrison and Valery Ponomarev (all of them played in the legendary Jazz Messengers ensemble), Ernie Watts (two-time Grammy Award winner), Dee Dee Bridgewater (three-time Grammy Award winner), Anne Hampton Calloway, Nicole Henry, Kevin Mahogany, Bobby Harden, Tommy Campbell, Fantine (USA), Mina Agossi, Andre Villeger, Jean Lou Longnon (France), John Downes, Anthony Strong (England), Benjamin Erman (Netherlands), Leonid Ptashka, Robert Anchipolovsky (Israel), Russian jazz stars Igor Bril, Igor Butman, Georgy Garanyan, Anatoly Kroll, Daniil Kramer, Vladimir Chekasin, Arkady Shilkloper and others.

In 2008, V. Tolkachev’s Big Band performed at the main arena of the Pori Jazz Festival in the same program with world jazz superstars: Chick Corea, Dave Wickle, Randy Brecker, Al Di Meola, Lenny White.

In 2013 and 2014 the group toured in South Korea, and one of the concerts took place in the best and largest concert hall in the country - the Seoul Art Center.

The big band has excellent reviews from experts:

“We didn’t suspect that there was such an amazing Big Band in your country”

ITAR-TASS correspondent V. Kutakhov summarizes the statements of the audience at the Seoul Art Center (July 2013).

“Vladimir Tolkachev’s big band is considered one of the best big bands in Russia. After seeing them in person, I can say that this is generally one of the best bands I have ever heard, this is a real Big Band with the style inherent in the great bands of the past."

Jason Park (Evening News, Manchester, England, July 2008)

“In Novosibirsk, talented scouts of the Jazz Music Initiative found a treasure, and Vladimir Tolkachev’s jazz orchestra was chosen as the top band of the festival”

“Hannoversche allgemeine zeitung”, No. 50, 02.28.2002

“What the listeners in the hall heard from the banks of the Ob River destroyed the cultural prejudices ingrained in Western heads... I wanted to pinch myself to believe in the reality of what was happening: this means what musical Siberia is like!”

Big band (English big band - large orchestra), a type of jazz instrumental ensemble, the number of musicians in which usually ranges from ten to seventeen people. Formed in the late 1920s, it consists of three orchestral groups: saxophones - clarinets (Reels), brass wind instruments(Brass, later there were groups of trumpets and trombones), rhythm section (Rhythm section - piano, double bass, guitar, percussion musical instruments).

The heyday of big band music, which began in the United States in the 1930s, is associated with a period of mass enthusiasm for swing - impulsive, energetic dance music that replaced the traditional black old-time jazz. Later, right up to the present day, big bands performed and continue to perform the music of the most different styles. However, in essence, the era of big bands begins much earlier and dates back to the times of American minstrel theaters in the second half of the 19th century, which often increased the performing cast to several hundred actors and musicians.

The evolution of the big band has an even more direct connection with the archaic New Orleans marching bands (march bands), ragtime bands and military brass bands that played on the streets, squares, parks, all kinds of entertainment venues and salons (society orchestras), on river steamships (riverboat bands). They were widely known in New Orleans at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. marching choirs such as the Olympia Band, Imperial Band, Magnolia Band, Tuxedo Band, Henry Allen Orchestra, Armand Pyron and John Robichaud's parlor bands, Faith Marable and Charlie Creath's Riverboat Bands, Jack Papa Lane's Dixieland Band, Buddy Bolden's Ragtime Band , blues band of William Christopher Handy (nicknamed the father of the blues) - characteristic representatives early orchestral jazz.

The black composer and bandmaster Will Marion Cook experimented with salon orchestras, creating symphonic-type music for them. John Philip Sousa (king of marches and inventor of the sousaphone) back in the 1890s. led brass bands of large and small compositions, performing ragtimes and marches with them. Pianist and composer Scott Joplin composed a symphony and two operas based on ragtime material, using a large mixed orchestra in these works. Among the musicians of classical New Orleans jazz, the most famous are their attempts to enlarge the traditional composition of a jazz band and create instrumental groups within it Jelly Roll Morton, Bunk Johnson, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Carroll Dickerson.

In the development of swing style and big band in the 1920s. Many orchestras and their leaders took part - both black jazzmen (Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Benny Mouten, Don Redman, Jimmy Lunsford, Charlie Johnson, William McKinney, Louis Russell, Earl Hines, Chick Webb, Cab Calloway) and white musicians -Jean Goldkette, Ben Pollack, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Glen Gray with his famous Casa Loma Orchestra, etc. Broadway and Hollywood popular music and sweet swing orchestras also made a certain contribution to the development of big band jazz. Violinist and bandleader Paul Whiteman, in collaboration with composer George Gershwin, laid the foundation for symphonic jazz experiments, which later acquired numerous supporters and followers.

In the 1930s commercialized white swing orchestras noticeably squeezed out black musicians, gaining the upper hand over them in economic competition, but soon white bandleaders realized the need to overcome the racial and commercial confrontation between white and black jazz (one of the first was the king of swing, Benny Goodman). Creative contacts between white and black jazzmen and their joint concert practice opened new horizons in the development of orchestral swing music. The best black big bands of this period include the orchestras of Benny Carter and Count Basie; among the white orchestras (in addition to Goodman's), the big bands of the Dorsey brothers, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Charlie Barnett, Harry James, Bing Crosby and his brother Bob Crosby are worthy of mention (Bob Cats). Since 1938, on Goodman's initiative, regular philharmonic concerts of orchestral jazz began to be held, in connection with which the tendency towards its rapprochement with academic concert music, towards stylistic synthesis and symphonization intensified.

Occurred in the 1940s. The bop revolution in jazz, which ushered in the era of modern jazz, brought to the fore the soloist-improviser and the chamber jazz ensemble - combo, but did not become an obstacle to subsequent renewal musical language and big band instrumentals. Experimental, innovative in nature are experiments with new sound (new sound), searches modern methods sound organization (up to dodecaphony and microchromatics), new ideas in the field of arrangement and composition, musical forms and polystylistics based on the big band. They worked especially fruitfully in the mainstream of progressive jazz in the 1940s and 1950s. Stan Kenton, Boyd Rayburn, Woody Herman. Orchestral cool style since the late 1940s. actively developed by Claude Thornhill, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, representatives of Californian West Coast jazz. Since the mid-1950s. The so-called third movement arose (a synthesis of modern jazz and academic musical avant-garde) led by composer Gunter Schuller and the leader of the famous Modern Jazz Quartet John Lewis. Historically significant were also the experiences of creating a bop big band and, on its basis, the Afro-Cuban style (Dizzy Gillespie), experiments with various orchestral compositions

Artistic director and conductor Vladimir Tolkachev, Honored Artist of Russia
Team Manager Victor Tregubov

About the team

The orchestra was created in 1985 from students of the Novosibirsk State Conservatory. For several years it was called Eurosib International. Since 1994, the orchestra has been part of the Novosibirsk State Philharmonic.

The team works in a variety of genres. One of the areas of his activity is free-form music - these are V. Tolkachev’s 40-minute variations on the theme of J. Gershwin “Summertime”, “Concerto for Orchestra” by V. Chekasin. The big band also carries out major projects: staging a jazz concert version of J. Gershwin's opera “Porgy and Bess” with American singers, a choir and a string orchestra; the first performance in Russia of Ellington-Strayhorn's Shakespeare Suite; performance of a program from works by Glazunov and Stravinsky with the participation of musicians of the academic symphony orchestra; jazz versions of “West Side Story” with string orchestra and Chamber Choir and music from the ballet “The Nutcracker” transcribed by Duke Ellington; Ellington's Second Sacred Concert; musical “De-Lovely”, program “Songs of Frank Sinatra”, etc.

The big band took part in more than 30 international jazz festivals: Pori and Imatra (Finland), Montreux (Switzerland), Vienne and Megève (France), Hannover (Germany); performed twice for 4 evenings in Paris at the famous jazz club Lionel Hampton.

Famous soloists performed with the group: Bobby Watson, Donald Harrison and Valery Ponomarev (all of them played in the legendary Jazz Messengers ensemble), Ernie Watts (two-time Grammy Award winner), Dee Dee Bridgewater (three-time Grammy Award winner), Anne Hampton Calloway, Nicole Henry, Kevin Mahogany, Bobby Harden, Tommy Campbell, Fantine (USA), Mina Agossi, Andre Villeger, Jean Lou Longnon (France), John Downes, Anthony Strong (England), Benjamin Erman (Netherlands), Leonid Ptashka, Robert Anchipolovsky (Israel), Russian jazz stars Igor Bril, Igor Butman, Georgy Garanyan, Anatoly Kroll, Daniil Kramer, Vladimir Chekasin, Arkady Shilkloper and others.

In 2008, V. Tolkachev’s Big Band performed at the main arena of the Pori Jazz Festival in the same program with world jazz superstars: Chick Corea, Dave Wickle, Randy Brecker, Al Di Meola, Lenny White.

In 2013 and 2014 the group toured in South Korea, and one of the concerts took place in the best and largest concert hall in the country - the Seoul Art Center.

The big band has excellent reviews from experts:

“We didn’t suspect that there was such an amazing Big Band in your country”

ITAR-TASS correspondent V. Kutakhov summarizes the statements of the audience at the Seoul Art Center (July 2013).

“Vladimir Tolkachev’s big band is considered one of the best big bands in Russia. After seeing them in person, I can say that this is generally one of the best bands I have ever heard, this is a real Big Band with the style inherent in the great bands of the past."

Jason Park (Evening News, Manchester, England, July 2008)

“In Novosibirsk, talented scouts of the Jazz Music Initiative found a treasure, and Vladimir Tolkachev’s jazz orchestra was chosen as the top band of the festival”

“Hannoversche allgemeine zeitung”, No. 50, 02.28.2002

“What the listeners in the hall heard from the banks of the Ob River destroyed the cultural prejudices ingrained in Western heads... I wanted to pinch myself to believe in the reality of what was happening: this means what musical Siberia is like!”