Liner Notes
Mike Holober & The Gotham Jazz Orchestra: Thought
Trains
(Sons of Sound SSPCD020)
"Jazz has little patience," wrote Whitney
Balliett in explaining the unstoppable evolution
of jazz improvisation through time, from its genesis
as "random gestures of black protest" through
the melodic interpretations and re-inventions that
helped define the idiom beginning in the 1920s,
to the creation of "free jazz," in which
all the elements of music are mutable.
That's the long view. Up close, you see jazz as
a veteran traveler who knowingly practices a lot
of patience, who can sit there in a waiting room
at a station and listen to the surrounding purls
of human activity with utter fascination. To the
attuned, there's music in all those moment-long
discernments that make the waiting — for
others, for your turn, for something to happen — integral
and important. The pause is for preparation.
Mike Holober loves trains. In his youth he spent
many long summer days in upstate New York waiting
by the tracks of Metro North's Harlem Valley line
for the big locomotives pulling freight cars and
the commuter trains to rumble past: Patience rewarded.
A recent camping trip found the pianist-composer
situated not far from a railway that crossed through
the wilderness, and when the late night freight
was coming down the tracks, he said, "I felt
that child-like thrill all over again," and
added, "It must be nostalgia." Or the
muse.
"Steel on steel, thousands of miles of steel
or tracks, with thousands of round, steel wheels — what
a happy marriage!" Duke Ellington loved trains,
too, and understood better than most people how
they conjured something primitive in people while
simultaneously heralding the modern. Do you think
a majority of musicians and composers today miss
the "romance of the rails" that once
touched millions, that they've become alienated
from the "rhythm of the motion"?
Not Holober. Trains – as literal objects
needing to be experienced or subjects perfect for
metaphor – still matter to him. He titled
a commissioned piece written for the American Saxophone
Quartet "Views from a Train" (The
Commission Project, Sons of Sound SSPCD009)
and a new song that he's playing these days in
a piano-vocal duo is "When There Were Trains." Obviously,
Holober has other conceptual and thematic preoccupations,
as those who know his extraordinary 2003 quintet
release, Canyon, will attest. It's an
album in which Holober, an avid outdoorsman, is
able to regard the designs found in natural landscapes
and thus translate ideas from this activity into
the spatial design we know as musical composition.
Now we know that in the quietude of remote America
this jazz artist still has his ears perked for
the toot of a train whistle.
Thought Trains – a real exercise
in patience, as the album was recorded in 1996
but only mixed, finally, last year – finds
Holober emerging from the big band traditions of
jazz with his own stylistic framework of instrumental
voicings and amalgamations. From the gathering
of steam underneath John Riley's brushes and the "uh-oh" horns
that commence the album, the eight songs on Thought
Trains is the kind of kinetic statement you'd
expect from someone who still exclaims in wonder
to anyone in earshot, "Here comes a train!" The
fact that much of Thought Trains was "through
composed," said Holober, means, of course,
that he penned one musical idea after another,
hitching them together like cars for a boisterous
engine to pull, the whole, sizable, forward-moving
entity a creative dynamo to be enjoyed. Trains
of musical thought from bona fide travel agent.
The Gotham Jazz Orchestra has been one of Holober's
mainstays for the past nine years. On Thought
Trains the mix of veterans and (then) thirty-somethings
stoke their solos and light into the charts with
undeniable spirit. Good writing certainly brings
out the best in players, especially on train songs.
Holober remarked not long ago that he's trying
to convince his wife Melissa to accompany him on
a train trip across Canada. The idea, quaint as
it may seem, is really about jazz in motion and
all those perfect fathomable pauses.
— Thomas Staudter
May 2004
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