Vancouver Vintage: Gillespiana

This second installment of Vancouver Vintage comes from the early 1960's and it's fantastic. I can't give any more information than the CBC announcer, Doug Campbell, did, so I'll just transcribe his introduction to the suite. The track I chose is the third movement, called Pan Americana. I should also note that the technical operations for that program were by Bob Grey and Monty Conner. The producer was Robert Chesterman. And the lead trumpeter of the brass ensemble was Kenneth Hopkins. Here's the intro: We begin this CBC Wednesday night broadcast before an invited audience in the ballroom of the Hotel Vancouver. During the next 50 minutes we are to hear a performance of a jazz suite written by the young South American composer Boris Schifrin. The suite is called Gillespiana, the work recently dedicated to the well-known American jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, who led the first public performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival last year. Gillespiana is scored for a featured jazz quintet together with a large scale brass and percussion group: four trumpets, four trombones, three french horns, one tuba, bongos, timbales and timpani. The conductor of this performance is Dave Robbins, and the featured soloist in the quintet is the noted American trumpeter Conte Candoli. The other members, all being Vancouver musicians: Fraser MacPherson on flute and alto saxophone; Chris Gage, piano; Paul Ruhland, bass; and Al Johnson, drums. The suite is written in five contrasting movements and in part consists of a blending of South American rhythms and sonorities with those of the jazz idiom, one of the reasons, incidentally, why the work was first dedicated to Dizzy Gillespie. The five movements go under the headings Prelude, Blues, Pan Americana, Africana, and Toccata. Dave Robbins directs the quintet and brass ensemble in the jazz suite Gillespiana by Boris Schiffrin. Comment in the Jazz Forum