Jazz Forest - North by Freaking West (2019)

×

Jazz Forest - North by Freaking West (2019)

Close

Composer arranger Ron Jones (Family Guy, Star Trek:TNG and more) as put together an all-star line up of jazz artists (Pete Christlieb, Chuck Findley, Bob McChesney, Jeff Kashiwa and more) playing updated standards and brand new charts by Ron Jones.

After spending about 45 years as a professional composer, with 37 of those years working for the major Hollywood Studios creating scores, I felt like it was time to do my thing. When you compose for a film or TV show you must underscore the story being told and hopefully make the audience feel the emotions that the media is telling. In moving to the Northwest and putting together the Jazz Forest band, I wanted to create with no limitations other than my imagination. We gathered a wonderful group of great talents and I composed and arranged a challenging book of charts
that really pushed each person. The music is not like most typical jazz works. Usually, the chart is simply a vehicle to set in motion all the solos. In the case of Jazz Forest, the composition is designed to play a much larger roll. I wanted each piece to take the band and the audience on a journey. The tune is played, the solos happen, but the piece develops and takes the listener to some place different.

In a time when everyone wants short messages,quick results and fast food, Jazz Forest goes against the trend. It is more of a symphonic approach. Each track features a symphonic string section. Each piece has several featured solo sections, so real jazz and lots of it is always there. If you go back to the work of the great innovative composer/arrangers like Gil Evans, like Sketches of Spain with Miles Davis you can hear a simalar design in the music. Claus Orgerman’s symphonic jazzscapes like his Gate of Dreams would be another example of what I am trying for with this project.

I came up with North By Freaking West one night while working on some arrangements for the band. I have always looked up to the great film composers such as Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams and Bernard Herrmann and gained so much from listening and studying their work. I though wouldn’t it be great to use some of the impressions of Bernard Herrmann’s thriller scores along with his use of minimalist rhythmic motives to create a fresh sort of Spy versus Spy sound. My wife heard me pounding away at the piano as I composed this piece. She said, what is that? It does not sound like Jazz, is that a film score?
I said it sort of is both Jazz and a film score. I commissioned a local fimmaker, Christos Kotsovos to create an homage’ to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, such as Vertigo, North By North West, Rear Window to serve as a video we could play with in performance. The result has been wildy fun and intersting. I hope the excitement and the style evokes that sort of feeling as you listen. I enjoy challenging myself to create something different. People have so many options for entertainment today and the whole vast cataloge of literally everything just a click away. If Jazz, if music is to survive and flurish in this competitive world it must be entertaining, exciting and compelling while still being about hwat matters in music. This is our answer to that question. I hope you enjoy the recordings as much as we enjoyed making them.