Hot Sonatas

Album review

Florida-based composer Gary Smart gives credit in his notes to the earlier figures who have used the term "hot sonata." Erwin Schulhoff was apparently the first, and Smart specifically credits a 1975 LP by violinist Joe Venuti and pianist Earl Hines as an influence (and manages to misspell the names of both Schulhoff and Hines). It's a natural way to describe the beginnings of the long and ongoing attempt to fuse jazz and the classical tradition, which lay in the French neo-classic scene of the 1920s and the interest in jazz shown by such composers as Maurice Ravel and especially Darius Milhaud. Smart's three sonatas here are attractive little pieces clearly rooted in that language, which he develops in several directions that were left unexplored as jazz influences were set aside, and even when they returned as part of Gunther Schuller's Third Stream movement, which generally avoided sonata forms. Smart's sonatas were composed in the early and middle 1980s, and the collection of three has the character of variations on a theme; they are clearly similar in style, but each has a different idea, and one that Smart's French models wouldn't have been in a position to hit on. The opening Maybrook Fancy, for flute and piano, consists of a single movement with two sections, the first in sonata form, the second a loose set of jazz quasi-improvisations (all the music is notated). The Sonata in Fancy, for cello and piano, is an homage to Duke Ellington and has the ambitious flavor of his jazz-classical crossovers (which are all too often ignored in discussions of this subject). The final Passing Fancies for clarinet and piano is suffused with the romantic language of 1930s popular song and quotes Jerome Kern's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes in its opening movement, "Smoke." Smart plays the piano throughout, and he has found three instrumental soloists unfazed by jazz rhythms. A lively program with music any recitalist might consider; the back cover indicates that scores are available from the composer, who teaches at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

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