Mr Sun’s work is cut out for us this year!
Mr Sun Plays Ellington Plays Tchaikovsky... We have transmogrified the legendary and mind-blowing Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker Suite into a recording by our Acoustic String Band, the one and only Mr Sun. It’s been beyond fun. We’ve gotten additional string players on there for the big horny sound. We skipped the drums, but there’s plenty of acoustic rhythms including a full menu of the violin percussion popularized by Darol over the last 25 years. We’re not going to rule anything out, including cellos, mandocellos, dobros & banjos. Maybe.
The Project has been generously underwritten by the Freshgrass Foundation, and we used the spectacular Mass/MOCA recording studio #9 in North Adams, MA. Mr Sun will premiere the work at the Freshgrass Festival in fall 2023, with an expanded ensemble made up of the most talented Berklee String Department undergraduates.
Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary Nutcracker Suite contains some of the most beloved and familiar melodies in the Western world. Mr Sun has seized upon the inspiration of Duke Ellington’s brilliant, sly, & urbane re-interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Suite as an opportunity to salute and re-invent this wildly multi-faceted work anew, through the lens of the American String Band, a musical form which now contains many styles and is presently engaged in a marathon upheaval of innovation and expansion.
This Suite seems to be pretty popular with the big bands. Aidan O’Donnell, our bassist, even toured this in Europe early in his career with the Scottish National Jazz Band. But it is still pretty much undiscovered material for strings. Maybe we can change that. Strayhorn's treatment of The Nutcracker is so excellently radical, funny, loose, and personal that it just seemed right up Mr Sun's alley. Using new and self-invented rhythm techniques combined with modern string ensemble sounds, the Mr Sun band will add a new facet of artistic musical thought to this work.
Lots of arranging, translating, transposition, further adaptation and inspiration have brought this music to a new life as a string band. Just as Strayhorn and Ellington completely re-imagined Tchaikovsky's monster hit, Mr Sun has done the same, in the tradition of The Hot Club Of France, the David Grisman Quintet, the Turtle Island String Quartet, and the Republic Of Strings.
The pieces range from close interpretations of Strayhorn’s original charts to intense extrapolations based on the spirit of the material. Mr Sun generally played original improvised solos, though a few beautiful statements by giants such as Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves were transcribed directly and played in their spirit. Much of the startling original horn voicing have been preserved in bowed string and multi-mandolin parts adding a punchy edge. There is one new additional piece, drawn directly from Tchaikovsky's Ballet, which takes three themes and sets them in classic “Dawg Music” format; and the Russian Dance is now hilariously full-on Bluegrass with banjo guest Alison Brown, but still using the spy-movie intros, outros, and background lines of Strayhorn's original. Jerry Douglas will interpret one of the iconic Lawrence Brown trombone solos on Dance Of The Floreadores, now re-titled “(don’t) Walk On The Flowers”.
The Ellingtonian versions of The Nutcracker feature both Billy Strayhorn's wide-ranging arranging genius and the interpretive genius of the band’s members, all major musical figures in their own right. The American string band tradition, which draws from a rich well of traditional fiddling melody and African rhythm and has steadily incorporated all the streams of American popular music, is a fertile new fold in the monumental origami of this evergreen masterpiece.