I’ve admired the music of both Aaron Diehl and Darcy James Argue for years—the former as an inheritor of and innovator in the tradition of pianists like John Lewis and Mary Lou Williams, the latter as a composer and bandleader whose works stretch the idiom of American big band in cerebral directions while augmenting its musicality. Fantastic stuff all around.
This past weekend, Diehl (who took over the 92Y “Jazz in July” series from Bill Charlap last year) hosted Argue and his band for the final night of the concert series. After performances of some of their earlier works, they premiered Argue’s new three-movement suite “A Banquet for the Birds.” (Major thanks to the 92Y for continuing to sell digital access to concerts, even years after the worst of 2020’s ambulance sirens. I was so happy to be able to watch while on a trip to rural Michigan.) This new work draws inspiration from Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s Iliad (which I haven’t read yet), and Argue’s title comes from one of its opening lines, which recounts how the Trojan War “made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds” (αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν / οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι).
The first movement (“The Sparrows and the Snake”) begins with a continuo organ, quickly giving way to trumpet flourishes that remind me of Kill Bill (complimentary!), a muslcal echo of the Iliad‘s martial backdrop. After just a minute so, Diehl plays—unaccompanied—over sparse harmonies whose mode recall Debussy’s Little Shepherd, with both perhaps drawing from the musical vocabulary of rustic Greece. The second half trades this simplicity for piano runs and chords less rustic and more Rachmaninoff-showstopper. Have we we entered a blood-and-guts scene from later in the Iliad? Those Tarantino flourishes return in the final measures of the movement, so yes, this is all drawn from Homer’s epic of gory swordfighting.
The second movement takes its title—”The Most Meaningful of Birds”—from Homer’s description in Book 8 of an eagle who proves ominous (as birds often do in Greco-Roman literature). As a side note, I’m interested in (but very open to) Wilson’s choice of “most meaningful” as the translation of τελειότατος (αὐτίκα δ᾽ αἰετὸν ἧκε τελειότατον πετεηνῶν)—perhaps “most perfect” or “most authoritative”? Anyhow, we begin with Diehl on the piano again. This time hamonies sound a little less foreign, less of-some-other-mode, but still with bare melodies. Especially when the band kicks in, Argue’s lone woodwind lines evoke something like Copland … or perhaps a Stravinsky chorale? (I love how both Argue and Diehl walk the tightrope between classical and jazz, and this movement is a great example of that balance.)
After some smoothed, almost gentle piano lines—is the eagle soaring away?—the final movement starts with disorderly, muted trumpets. Drums and piano and bass soon add to the chaos. So begins “A Tangled Cry,” the last movement. Diehl comes back with some of those Copland/Stravinsky cadences before returning to percussive chords—soon joined by more trumpet flourishes—that remind us that we’re still in the ninth year of the Trojan War. Indeed, the sombre saxophone and trumpet lines that come shortly before the final, grim harmonies of the suite signal how the Iliad is not a tale of Greek triumph or really even of Achilles’ kleos aphthiton but of the shared, tragic annihilation of warfare.