Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band in Concert — Free

I happened on this tidbit about a third of the way through a September 5, 2005 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article about Goodwin's band, "without a doubt the cleanest, sharpest, most disciplined [jazz] band going today."

The group performed at New Trier High School in Evanston, Illinois in February of 2005, part of the school's annual Jazz Festival.

Buried deep — really, really deep, so deep it challenged even my crack research team™ — in the Jazz Festival website is a link to a page with the archives of that year's performances.

And right there is a link for you to click on: "Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band — See their perfomance."

It's the full show, 73 minutes long.

McDonough wrote, in his WSJ story, "At New Trier the band burst into action with a piece called 'High Maintenance.' The kids in the audience jumped to their feet, and the brass hammered out a shattering sequence of jabs that sent eyes popping and jaws dropping."

Here's the entire article.

His Jazz Band Is a Big Phat Hit On the High-School Circuit

When bandleader, pianist and saxophonist Gordon Goodwin was in high school and college in the 1970s, his role models were Buddy Rich, Count Basie and Woody Herman. Today he has become precisely that sort of role model for the kind of kid he once was. One big difference, though: The big-band sound has grown even more remote from mass culture. But in the unlikely event that big-band jazz ever makes a comeback, count on two things: It won't sound like Glenn Miller. And there will be a vast army of young players to man the horns.

Nowadays, the big-band action is not in the ballrooms, but in the classrooms. About 15,000 big-band jazz ensembles are up and playing in American high schools and colleges, according to Bill McFarlin, executive director of the International Association for Jazz Education. This is where you'll see teens standing up and wildly cheering a full sax and brass section arrayed on risers behind music stands.

That was the scene I saw not too long ago in Winnetka, Ill., at the annual New Trier High School Jazz Festival. The object of the adoration was Mr. Goodwin's Big Phat Band, a crack crew of seasoned Los Angeles musicians who have honed their skills in the studios and are now one of the more unexpected successes on the high-school and college clinic circuit. This summer the band put out its third CD, "The Phat Pack," on Immergent Records.



Jim Warrick, director of the New Trier jazz program, called Big Phat "without a doubt the cleanest, sharpest, most disciplined big band going today." And Mr. Goodwin and his men earned those adjectives with a combination of athletic precision and aesthetic purpose. At New Trier the band burst into action with a piece called "High Maintenance." The kids in the audience jumped to their feet, and the brass hammered out a shattering sequence of jabs that sent eyes popping and jaws dropping. Every eight bars the rhythm section jerked to a stop and the saxes or brass squeezed out a primal glissando that soared into a steep, slicing shriek. Each break cued ecstatic cheers from the crowd. For the next 75 minutes the energy hardly let up. (You can see the entire concert for free on the school's Web site — www.ntjazz.com)

The education market has been a refuge for many famous bandleaders and musicians since academic jazz programs began gaining traction in the '50s and '60s. High-school and university jazz clinics not only helped keep veterans such as Stan Kenton and Woody Herman on the road in their last years but became a fount of fresh and eager talent that kept bands remarkably contemporary. You might think that the Big Phat Band was tailored with just that audience in mind. But you would be wrong.

"We had no business plan," Mr. Goodwin said in a recent telephone interview. "Our audience was ourselves. That's all. We had no intention of doing live gigs."

Besides, he saw little chance of getting them. This is not a band that plays "In the Mood." The book is high-powered and eclectic -- everything from a jazz treatment of "Bach 2 Part Invention in D Minor" to "Hunting Wabbits," a staccato fugue inspired by the Warner Bros. cartoon scores of Carl Stalling. But when the band's first CD, "Swingin' for the Fences," drew two Grammy nominations in 2001, concert offers were not far behind.

One was from Cal State at Northridge, his alma mater, where Mr. Goodwin earned his first professional credential while still a senior. John De Bello, his roommate's older brother, was directing a film and asked Mr. Goodwin if he'd write the music for it. The movie was 1978's "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes." "I had no idea what I was doing," Mr. Goodwin concedes. "Fortunately the music was not the worst thing about that movie." But it launched a career that soon put him on the A-list of L.A. studio musicians and arrangers. That's how he would meet many of the players who now make up his band.

"I didn't know if we'd get through the first gig we did," Mr. Goodwin recalls. "For a studio player, performance is a series of sprints where you concentrate on nailing one short cue exactly right. Going on stage and playing difficult material for 90 minutes that people are reacting to is quite a different thing."

It soon became clear that the Big Phat Band was on to something with young audiences who loved its energy and bravado. "As we saw the phenomenon begin to unfold," Mr. Goodwin says, "we began to think what we could do to maximize this thing we have. This is our core audience." It was then that the Big Phat Band formulated a plan. Mr. Goodwin reached out to jazz educators and made sure that the band's music was published and available to band directors. He broke new marketing ground for a big band by targeting kids directly through Myspace.com. A second CD came in 2003 along with T-shirts and posters. The Big Phat Band's reputation began to spread from its base.

"The first time I heard about the band," says Mr. Warrick, director of the New Trier jazz program, "it was from my students, which tells you something. Since then, the rise in awareness has been meteoric. I've seen kids lined up in 20-minute lines to get an autograph. [Mr. Goodwin] has rock star status with high-school jazz kids."

The band manages one or two performances a month, in part because its personnel is largely a closed shop of veteran pros. If, say, trombonist Andy Martin gets a call for the Oscar telecast or percussionist Louis Conte is on tour with James Taylor, the band's payroll must stretch to compete with the opportunities his musicians are offered. But the camaraderie pays off. One New Trier student later said that he loved watching how the musicians relate to one another. "That's great," says Mr. Goodwin. "I like to hear that people are picking up on that. But even though we are having a good time, we're deadly serious about it."



As for the future of big-band jazz, Mr. Goodwin takes a "build it and they will come" view — since he launched the Big Phat Band, he says, people have been coming. Pixar heard the band, decided it wanted a big-band sound for "The Incredibles," and came to him for arrangements. Last February, one of his charts — "The Incredits" — won a Grammy Award. He recently completed work on Warner Bros.' "Bah Humduck," a Looney Tunes version of "A Christmas Carol." "They called because they heard the Big Phat Band," he says. "They wanted big-band jazz in this picture."

It's important to find "the one guy who loves big bands and is powerful enough to make something happen," Mr. Goodwin says. "It may be a TV producer, or someone at Starbucks or Coca-Cola. But find that connection." He says that back in the 1989 Steven Spielberg, in exchange for allowing his name to be put on the original "Tiny Toon Adventures" TV series as executive producer, insisted that each episode be scored with a live orchestra. "That edict led to 10 years [of shows and spin-offs] in which young people were exposed to a big-band sound on a daily basis," he notes. Now Mr. Goodwin is doing his part to help such bands play on.