Information about the New England Jazz Ensemble (a April 2007 review of the band’s last live recording by the venerable jazz critic, Owen McNally, The Hartford Courant)

The New England Jazz Ensemble, an invaluable cultural asset deserving far wider recognition, has taken another significant step in its distinguished career with the release of its first live recording.

With its trademark mix of swing and sophistication, the Hartford-based regional band displays its musical depth and expressive range on a new disc recorded live Oct. 15, 2005, at the Pittsfield CityJazz Festival at Berkshire Music Hall, Pittsfield, Mass.

Distributed by Sea Breeze Jazz Records, “New England Jazz Ensemble Live at the Pittsfield CityJazz Festival” is a fine sampler of NEJE’s vitality and versatility. The project was made possible by a grant from the Aaron.

An alliance of high-caliber professional musicians from throughout New England, NEJE was founded in 1991 by its pianist and music director, Walter Gwardyak, and trumpeter Mike Jones. It was originally conceived as a rehearsal band to serve as a forum for new compositions by its resident composers. A non-profit organization, NEJE plows proceeds it generates back into its maintenance costs ranging from rehearsal expenses to travel costs.

There’s no profit motive here. So what’s the incentive?

Players join NEJE out of love for the music and because it’s a high quality cooperative and expressive outlet for kindred spirits bonded by a deep commitment to compose, arrange and play fresh-sounding ensemble jazz.

One of the band’s hallmarks has been its openness to new, creative writing as a way to move away from big band stereotypes.

Playing with an empathetic group of peers provides members with a creative refuge from their necessary but sometimes confining professional duties.

The band’s joy in exploring originality comes shining through on its new album in many ways, including its showcasing of the composing and arranging skills of Gwardyak and his colleagues, lead saxophonist John Mastroianni and lead trumpeter Jeff Holmes.

Many members teach music at the high school and university level or as private instructors, a factor that accounts for one of the repertory troupe’s prime missions, which is to spread the word about jazz through education.

Mastroianni, for example, is a noted music educator who has been one of the guiding forces in propelling the nationally recognized jazz program at West Hartford’s Hall High School. Gwardyak, the band’s maestro, is dean of music at the Hartford Conservatory and teaches in the school’s jazz program.

Since its start with sessions in a restaurant in Windsor, the band has recorded four albums and taken its contemporary big band message to the Corinth Jazz Festival in Greece. (The trip was underwritten by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and other sources.)

NEJE has played in the Lake George Jazz Festival to the Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz. Its many guest soloists have included Phil Wilson, Dick Johnson, Giacomo Gates and Ali Ryerson.

It has given clinics in high schools. And its large repertoire, which includes a storehouse of hundreds of original charts, features the Ellington/Strayhorn “Nutcracker Suite,” a hardy holiday perennial.

As a sign of the NEJE’s credo, which is rooted in playing bold, original material, it has performed Gwardyak’s acclaimed three-movement suite for symphony orchestra and jazz band with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and with the Manchester Community Orchestra. Combining jazz elements and classical orchestral traditions, Gwardyak drew on serial music and 12-tone techniques for his third-stream blend of symphonic colors and big band swing. On Gwardyak’s strictly jazz originals for NEJE, the composer/arranger, who writes voicings that both sing and swing, blends the power of a big band with the agility and quickness of a combo.

On the new album, NEJE sounds right at home grooving through blues, bebop, bossa, ballads, modal and odd-time signatures. Gwardyak’s clever piece called “Neves” (seven spelled backward) features variations on a funk lick done in 7/4. Smart and accessible, it’s a toe-tapping opus de funk sure to delight both old and new big band fans.

Similarly, Mastroianni’s composition, “Nasty Masty,” is packed with pizazz and accented by the multi-instrumentalist’s crisp work on alto.

Holmes’ “Esprit” – an apt title for this band with beaucoup esprit de corps – kicks off the CD after a brief intro by the concert’s emcee. Immediately, it sets the standard for the band’s clean unison sound, soloing strengths and persistent sense of swing.

Besides its composing and arranging assets, NEJE boasts a first-rate lineup in all its sections, including many names familiar to Hartford jazz fans such as alto saxophonist Bob DePalma, tenor saxophonist George Sovak and trombonist Peter McEachern.

The new disc’s personnel are reeds: Mastroianni, DePalma, Sovak, Larry Dvorin and Lisa LaDone; trumpets/flugelhorns: Holmes, Steve Fitzko, Phil Person and Hank Zorn; trombones: Tim Atherton (lead), McEachern, Dave Sporny and Dave Wampler; rhythm section: Gwardyak, bassist Steve Bulmer
and drummer Jon Mele.

Gwardyak finds encouraging signs, not just in the resiliency and quality of NEJE, an acoustic band, but even in such high-tech, post-Big Band Era innovations as the Internet.

The Internet, he says gratefully, helps spread the word about NEJE.

Gwardyak explains: “I got an e-mail from someone in Australia inquiring about how to get our charts. And I just sold a CD to somebody from England, who had heard about us through the Internet,” he says.

Another web-browsing fan was so impressed with the NEJE that he contacted Gwardyak, inquiring if the band would be willing to play at an upscale wedding in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

“We don’t play weddings,” Gwardyak says,” but this guy really dug jazz, and said he just wanted us to play jazz and nothing else, all instrumental, no singers, no deejays. So we went and played under a tent outdoors. It was all jazz, and they loved it.”