Music: Bilingual Jazz

“These boys,” said the visiting professor, “are hot. They are brilliant. They are right on top of the heap.” The oddly unpedantic judgment was prompted by a concert last week in Rome’s isth century Palazzo Pio. Performing were four young men who make up the American Jazz Ensemble—a group that has set avant-garde beards to wagging the length of Italy.

Headed by Clarinetist Bill Smith and Pianist Johnny Eaton, the Jazz Ensemble prides itself on being “bilingual,” e.g., mixing cool jazz with rigorously difficult modernist works by Roger Sessions, Darius Milhaud, Eaton himself. Whatever it plays, the ensemble likes to force its instruments to their outer limits. When at tacking modernist music, Eaton, for instance, favors dissonant jumps from one end of the keyboard to the other, violently plucks at the piano’s innards to get a harp effect. Smith has developed a technique of aiming his clarinet directly at the piano strings to create weird and ghostly harmonics. A virtuoso on his instrument. Smith also likes to push his clarinet above top C or to engage in a series of strangely manipulated double and triple stoppings. The piece most startling to audiences is a concoction by Smith in which he improvises against a background tape recording of an electronically scrambled version of his own clarinet playing, complete with “key clicks and breath noises.”

The ensemble’s cool jazz style is less weird, but technically just as adroit. With his left leg swinging, Pianist Eaton may toy with harmonies and tempi, bounce themes to the fluid clarinet, trade solos with the limpid trumpet. Underneath it all is a rock-solid bass. Last week the boys wound up with Long Ago and Far Away and a driving Summertime. The palazzo shivered, and the audience applauded. “An intellectual Newport,” said a delighted U.S. composer as he made his way from the hall.

Study in Contrasts. Except in their musical tastes, Co-Founders Eaton and Smith are as much a study in contrasts as last week’s program. Son of a Methodist minister, Pennsylvania-born Johnny Eaton. 26, started composing and playing the piano as a youngster, but he went to Princeton to prepare for a law career. Work with Roger Sessions, and the success of a couple of fine jazz albums that he cut for Columbia with his own student combo, changed his mind. After touring the U.S. with Flutist Herbie Mann and a jazz combo, he settled down to serious composition. His most ambitious work to date: an opera about the Ma Barker mob, which appeals to him because “you need subhuman or superhuman characters in opera” and because he hopes that the role of 220-lb. Ma will “resuscitate the race of Wagnerian sopranos.”

California-born Bill Smith, on the other hand, prefers chamber works to vocal compositions, has written some highly praised pieces (Divertimento for Norvo, Concerto for Clarinet and Combo) for chamber jazz groups. Juilliard trained and, like Eaton, a Roger Sessions pupil, Smith, 34, was a fellow student with Dave Brubeck at Mills College and a charter member of the original Brubeck Octet. He is still under contract to Brubeck, is on leave from his teaching post (composition) at U.S.C.

For Fun & Profit. The two men met at the American Academy in Rome, where both are composing on Prix de Rome and Guggenheim grants. They formed their jazz ensemble last winter for fun rather than profit, but soon stirred up so much interest that most of their concerts have been sold out. They are better composers, they figure, because of their jazz experience—and better jazzmen because they know how to compose. “Jazz forms,” says Clarinetist Smith, “are usually stereotyped, like a housing project with the houses all alike. We want to change the number of rooms and the size and placement of the windows and doors.”