The Buffalo News - Album Review: The Chase - Jeff Simon

Publication Date: April 20, 2014

Author: Jeff Simon

David White Jazz Orchestra, “The Chase” (Mister Shepherd). Trombonist, composer and bandleader David White not only grew up in Buffalo but was 14 when he began playing in Macy Favor’s big band at the Colored Musicians Club of Buffalo. “Macy was an important figure since I had a single mother and my grandfather had passed” he says now. “Music was always something that added discipline in my life. There’s the discipline of practicing. There’s the discipline of being in bands, which is more responsibility than a lot of 14-year-olds would have had. It let me get a lot of my trial and error out of my way at an early age. “He moved to New York in 2003, began playing with Charli Persip’s and Valery Ponomarev’s Big Band and began his own big band in 2007 which included musicians he’d known since high school in Buffalo, including drummer Ryan Cavan. He wants to explore “a whole palette of orchestral colors within the big band that are not always tapped into.… It’s like having a giant box of crayolas where you can color and draw anything you can imagine.” His orchestral imagination is certainly unusual but by no means radical. On the other hand, how many jazz orchestras do you know where a composer/arranger is influenced by Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” and names tunes after Sally Draper on “Mad Men”? His band is a good one, full of good soloists including tenor saxophonist Sam Dillon and pianist Nick Consol. ΩΩΩ (Jeff Simon)