Sherrie Maricle & the DIVA Jazz Orchestra

By Frank Leone, Pres. LVJS

March 9, 2009 • UNLV Judy Bayley Theater

If they weren’t called DIVA, they could be called Sherrie Maricle and the Miracles. By this title I mean playing that was nothing short of miraculous,

not a 50’s Doo Wop group the title would suggest. Forget gender regarding this all-female band; walk in the audience blindfolded and they’d never know it. This band is as powerful and exciting as it gets. Tes-tosterone’s not necessary, estrogen rules the day!

The band opened with Peggy Lee’s original, “I Love Being Here With You,” her signature show open-er, and an equally fitting greeting for DIVA delivered in a rousing arrangement propelled by swinging solos by Janelle Reichmann (T-Sax), Tanya Darby (Tpt.), and Lisa Parrott on baritone sax playing this demand-ing, unwieldy instrument with as much command as might have Gerry Mulligan. The tuneful “greeting” was heartily accepted by the audience.

Pianist Chihiro Yamanaka, visiting DIVA alumnus followed with the Peggy Lee-Duke Ellington collabo-ration, ‘’I’m Gonna Go Fishin’.” This gal was a pack-age of dynamite! Her performance was a tour de force, alternating from walking slow to blazing fast tempos, and varying with the band popping in and out, to stretches of solo piano. Stylistically she played stride like Waller, later switching to Garneresque comping, and finally in the manner of Art Tatum, with blazing runs and other pianistic intricacies, all combined with the power of an Oscar Peterson. The piece progressed in break-neck speed with the band accompanying the piano in a fiery fashion. The audience spontaneously leapt to its feet in wild appreciation and enthusiasm.

Ellington’s “In A Mello Tone” was a charming relaxer perked up by an inventive arrangement featur-ing distinctive solo work by Jami Dauber on trumpet and former Las Vegan, Debbie Weisz, commandingly

soloing on trombone, making proud her teacher, Las Vegan Bob Scann.

Arresting us next was Janelle Reichmann’s stunning rendition of Benny Goodman’s “Rachel’s Dream”, leaping right out of the chute with high energy and displaying dazzling digital dexterity. The audience was flabbergasted by her performance, which was in keep-ing with the spirit of Goodman, and technically envi-able for any clarinetist. If Eddie Daniels were present, I’m sure he’d agree. I was delighted to be able to pur-chase the CD with this selection recorded by Janelle.

Things calmed down with the ballad, “Stars Fell On Alabama,” featuring the sweet-toned trumpet of Carol Morgan, interpretively compelling just as Chris Botti might be. Balancing counterpoint plus keen soloing was provided by Leigh Pilzer on tenor sax.

“Airmail Special” closed the show featuring Sharel Cassity and Scheila Gonzales burning on alto saxes, bassist Noriko Ueda mesmerizing with her solo, and at last, leader and drummer Sherrie Maricle tearing it up. Her soloing was an exhibition of the greatest aspects of drumming from subtlety and finesse to technical heat with great power. She reflected the best aspects of past pioneers like Buddy Rich, to those of newer exemplars like Steve Gadd and Dave Weckl. This number brought the house down and the audience to its feet in thunderous applause, led by their vener-able manager, the legendary Stanley Kaye. Hearty thanks are in order for Larry Ruvo and Mke Severino of Southern Wine & Spirits of Nevada, who made this long overdue visit by DIVA possible.

An encore was necessary “by demand,” and the audience was indulged with “Three Sisters and a Cousin,” which featured all five saxes. Afterward, many of the band came out to the lobby to meet their audience and sign CD’s. They then were bussed over to the Bootlegger for dinner, where later several sat-in and tore that place apart. This was truly a day of joy. Now take the blindfolds off, they’re women playing as great as any male band!

10 | JAZZ NOTES! May-Jun. 2009www.divajazz.com

REVIEWS 06.17.08

Throw in a couple of glorious big bands, and whatever else happens, you’ve got a jazz festival to remember. The Play-boy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl deposited just such a pair during the

weekend, thus showing itself worthy of its 30th anniversary.

The Diva Jazz Orchestra touched on the accumulat-ing history of jazz itself, not only with its classic, cooking charts but with an affectionate tribute to the late Tommy Newsom, the great unsung tenor-man who was “Mr. Excitement” in the old “Tonight Show” band.

They called it “Rachel’s Dream,” after the Benny Goodman classic, but it sounded an awful lot like “Three Little Words,” and it was played by clarinet-ist Janelle Reichman with remarkable warmth and a beautiful full sound.

The same words could be used for the band as a whole, driven by the leader Sherrie Maricle at the drums and Angeleno Jennifer Leitham on bass, with Tanya Darby on lead trumpet and Sharel Cas-sity on lead alto saxophone. They made Saturday’s auditory reputation.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER06.17.08

CONCERT

Playboy Jazz FestivalCOOKIN’ AND CLASSIC: The Diva Jazz Orchestra, including Janelle Reichman, left, and Sharel Cassity, highlighted Saturday’s bill.

By Tony Gieske

www.divajazz.com

Drummer Sherry Maricle’s furiously swinging big band wears its Buddy Rich pedigree proudly, delivering a demonstra-tive but finely focused sound solidly grounded in tradition. The New York unit’s fifth recording, produced by Mari-cle, spotlights the work of veteran ar-ranger Tommy Newsom with the group’s signature verve and vitality.

Two Newsom originals, the opener “Titter Pipes,” an early-’60s Benny Goodman commission, and “Three Shades Of Blue” showcase the arranger as a composer as well. The first emulates the classic Zoot Sims/Phil Woods inter-action of the original, with fine soloiug by Scheila Gonzalez on tenor and Karo-lina Strassmayer on alto sax, while the second features a cool blues groove high-lighted by Chihiro Yamanaka’s piano.

DIVA has always been partial to medleys and indulges in several this time, the most elaborate being a four-tune trib-

ute to Nat “King” Cole that allows Newsom to orchestrate the band’s smooth flow through “Mona Lisa,” “Na-ture Boy” and “Straighten Up And Fly Right” before having fun with “Route 66.” Two additional medleys address Ir-ving Berlin, Johnny Mercer and Richard Rogers standards with equally impressive outcomes.

But it’s on tunes such as Clare Fischer’s “Pensativa,” featuring Strass-mayer’s superlative flute, Duke Elling-ton’s “Come Sunday,” with an excellent baritone sax solo from Lisa Parrott, and the closing “Red Door,” another Zoot Sims composition in which Maricle fi-nally lets loose on drums, that DIVA best exhibits the uniform virtuosity of its players and the unified vision of its ap-proach.

Oh, yeah, they’re all women. –Michael Point

TNT: Titter Pipes; Pensativa; Three Shades Of Blue; Moonlight; Nat Cole Medley; Too Late Now; Trail Mix; Remember Medley; Come Sunday; Red Door. (64:13) Personnel: Sherrie Maricle, drums; Karolina Strassmayer, Leigh Pilzer, alto saxophone; Anat Cohen, Scheila Gonzalez; tenor saxophone; Lisa Parrott, baritone saxophone; Liesl Whitaker, Tanya Darby, Barbara Laronga, Cindy Bradley, Jami Dauber, trumpet; Deborah Weisz, Lori Stuntz, Leslie Havens, trombone; Chihiro Yamanaka, piano; Noriko Ueda, bass.

www.divajazz.com

The Wall Street Journal. September 22, 2005

Testosterone Is Not a Musical Instrument By Nat Hentoff

omorrow and Saturday, DIVA, the most riveting and powerfully swing-ing big jazz band in the land, will appear at Dizzy's Club Coca- Cola at

Frederick P. Rose Hall, the resplendent home of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Led, starting in 1993, by drummer Sherrie Maricle, these 15 jazz women are up against considerable odds, jubilantly defying the long-held con-viction of many listeners, and not a few male jazzmen, that while girl singers and pianists are acceptable in the jazz community, women instrumentalists don't have the "chops" or the stamina to swing long and hard enough to be taken seriously.

In the illuminating "Jazzwomen: Con-versations with Twenty-One Musicians" by Wayne Enstice and Janis Stockhouse (Indi-ana University Press), Jane Ira Bloom -- a continually inventive soprano saxophonist and composer -- speaks of the "continuing phone calls that you don't get . . . or why you're never thought of among the list of musicians in a promoter's mind when a festival is being prepared."

Four years ago, at a rally outside a Lincoln Center benefit gala, one of the women jazz players protesting the absence (still the case) of any full-time female players in Wynton Marsalis's Lincoln Cen-ter Jazz Orchestra, held up an educational sign: "Testosterone Is Not a Musical In-strument!" This year's "Diet Coke Women in Jazz Festival at Jazz at Lincoln Center" (through Oct. 2), which includes the DIVA gigs, is one of the increasing indications that while the glass ceiling hasn't been broken, there are cracks in the male domi-nance of jazz.

Another sign of a new age of enlight-enment on the jazz scene was DIVA's selec-tion this year in the 53rd annual Down Beat Critics Poll as one of the best big jazz bands. The year before, in the magazine's annual readers poll, listeners had already come to that conclusion.

In the glory days of big jazz bands -- and DIVA may well help bring them back -- there used to be competitions between the bands (called "cutting sessions"). For in-stance, Count Basie vs. Benny Goodman. These nights, DIVA could swing most of the current big bands out of the room. Listening to their recordings "Sherrie Maricle and the DIVA Jazz Orchestra" (www.divajazz.com) and "TNT," a tribute to one of the music's unjustly uncelebrated arrangers, Tommy Newsom (available starting Sept. 27 at ma-jor retailers and on Amazon.com), not even

the staunchest male chauvinist could tell the gender of the players.

DIVA's aren't-you-glad-you're-alive spirit and exultant cohesiveness bring me back to when I was an 11-year-old shouting aloud on a Boston street. My sudden discov-ery of jazz as Artie Shaw's "Nightmare" came out of a record store struck me hard -- and permanently.

The DIVA scores -- bracingly thrusting section playing on the swingers; on ballads, the flowing voicings, colored to shifting moods of each song -- are crafted to intro-duce and support the strikingly individual voices of the soloists. And it all converges into the vibrantly pulsating collective pres-ence of DIVA!

Ms. Maricle's discovery of what was to be her lifetime vocation (she is also on New York University's jazz and percussion fac-ulty) came when she was 11, too. Her sev-enth-grade teacher took her to a concert of macho drummer Buddy Rich and his Killer Force Orchestra in Binghamton, N.Y. (Rich could have made a military band swing.) Thereafter, in her basement, with her drum set, Sherrie played along with Rich's big-band recordings to get her "chops" in shape.

Later, at the state college at Bingham-ton, as one of two drummers in the student band, she came up against the girls-can't-swing wall. The teacher, handing out a big-band arrangement, told her: "Honey, this is a hard-driving Buddy Rich chart. Step aside, little girl, let me handle it." She did not step aside, and taught the teacher a lesson.

By a novelistic turn of fate, Ms. Mari-cle was stirred to form DIVA after, in 1992,

she was heard on drums by a former man-ager of Rich, Stanley Kay. He had earlier been Rich's assistant drummer.

"At a benefit concert in New Haven," Mr. Kay tells me, "Maurice Hines -- the dancer, singer, choreographer, whom I was managing -- was set to perform with an or-chestra conducted by Skitch Henderson. Sherrie, then 27, was the drummer, swinging unbelievably well. Skitch then hired her for his New York Pops orchestra. Two years later, knowing jazz has no gender, and think-ing of forming an all-woman orchestra, I asked Sherrie if she knew of other women who play as well as she does. 'Lots,' she said."

Mr. Kay recalls that "at the auditions, 40 showed up. We picked 15. Harry 'Sweets' Edison [long Count Basie's leg-endary trumpet player] was there. He said: 'Stanley, you've got something! Keep on it!' It's become my life's work." Mr. Kay is DIVA's manager, creative director, and ceaseless cheerleader. At a DIVA concert, he takes pleasure in saying to people in the audience, "Turn around and tell me if women or men are playing."

As DIVA was struggling for recogni-tion, some of the towns they played on the road were so small, says one of the side-women, that the prestige restaurant was a Pizza Hut. But they kept on keeping on, playing festivals in Europe to standing ovations. And as of recently, their re-cordings will be distributed world-wide by Lightyear Records through WEA (War-ner/Elektra/Atlantic).

Increasingly, Ms. Maricle tells me, she's hearing from aspiring women jazz mu-sicians in Europe, Asia, South America, "and even from someone in Iceland. They call, send audition tapes, and want to know how they can make their way as women in jazz. A young trumpet player in Massachusetts sent an email saying she needs support be-cause she's having a hard time. She knows jazz is her passion, but all the boys in the band tell her she's just a girl and can't play that instrument."

Also asking for help was a high-school music teacher in the Midwest. "He wanted a poster of the musicians in DIVA to show the girls that women can do this." (Tell the girls to listen to DIVA's recordings and then play them for the boys in the band.)

Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal

T

www.divajazz.com

I get that thrill from a big band, Diva, which has played prestigious festivals in Europe—and in the States hits some towns so small that the prestige restaurant is a Pizza Hut. Because the band doesn't get enough consecutive gigs in a year—maybe 30 to 35 altogether—the sidewomen freelance, play in Broadway shows and teach. But the center of their musical lives is the band. Diva's drummer-leader is Sherrie Maricle, whose day job is director of percussion studies at New York University, where she has twice been voted teacher of the year. As a composer-arranger, she transcends categories.

None of the established jazz record labels has room these days for Diva, so its new release, Live in Concert: Sherrie Maricle and the Diva Jazz Orchestra, is self-produced. (You can buy it at Diva's Web site, divajazz.com.) The performance was recorded at the Manchester Crafts-men's Guild in Pittsburgh on June 21, 2002. From note one, the powerful swinging pulse of the band made me wish I still had a jazz-radio program, as I used to in Boston and New York. I would set up a blindfold test for every guest musician and put on a track or two from this Diva set. I would bet my rare International Sweethearts of Rhythm recording that no one would be able to identify the gender of the players.

Diva began in 1992, cofounded by Maricle, John La-Barbara and Stanley Kay, the creative director. Kay is the band's manager and tireless cheerleader. A former drummer, he managed Buddy Rich and Gregory and Maurice Hines. As for Diva, he advises one and all, "Turn around and tell me if women or men are playing." From the blazing opener, Kay's "Did You Do That?" to Deborah Weisz's subtle con-versational trombone during "In a Mellotone" and Lisa Parrott's robust, thrusting baritone saxophone on "I've Got the World on a String," Diva's infectious spirit and exultant cohesiveness are what drew me into jazz when I was 11 years old. I was struck on the street, as if by lightning, by Artie Shaw's "Nightmare" coming from a record store.

Max Roach and Martin Williams used to liken jazz to the essence of democracy—self-expression further energized and magnified in active collaboration with one's peers. In jazz, this often-joyous intersection is amplified in a big band.

When Diva played Croatia, they received 15 bouquets at the end of the performance—a tribute hardly likely for an all-male band. But what comes through consistently and persis-tently in Diva's music is not exotica—chicks with chops!—but the very essence of the jazz experience. Miles Davis and I were once talking about some critics and listeners who di-vide music, any kind of music, into categories. "Andre Watts," Miles said, "plays a good piano; so does Bill Evans. Everyone who's out there is connected, not pigeonholed ac-cording to some label."

Including pigeonholed by gender. That Diva doesn't get more gigs, particularly in the U.S., where jazz began, is due in part to the limited attention it gets in the jazz press. And that comes, I believe, from the continuing assumption, how-ever subliminal, that women singers and pianists can be ad-mitted to the fraternity; but women instrumentalists, let alone all-female bands, still have to prove that they have the "balls" to be authentic jazzmakers. Oh, there are interesting features, sometimes sections, in jazz magazines on women in jazz, but the attitude is often that of noblesse oblige, like making sure there are enough blacks on television sitcoms.

Here is Diva—not a pickup band for record dates, still out there on a bus, along with the other doughty surviving big bands, and with a signature sound and distinctive solo-ists, getting standing ovations on most of its gigs. Yet in Down Beat's big band issue this year, there was no mention of Diva, nor was Diva to be found in the Women in Jazz is-sue of Jazziz. But in the band's promotional material, there is an earlier citation from JazzTimes: "The band punched, kicked, roared and swung with a disciplined abandon and unaffected joie de vivre." And in the British magazine Cres-cendo Geoff Burdett writes of the Live in Concert CD: "I confess to being very surprised by the sheer power and spirit of this band, quite apart from the very high level of musical ability on display…. Make no mistake, these girls can play, and I mean play."

If there were still big band cutting sessions, "these girls" would swing a lot of the remaining big bands out of the place. And maybe that news would bring them the attention in the jazz press and elsewhere that they deserve. I hope this column will bring them more radio play. But what I often did on the air was not announce the names until after the re-cording. That would startle some macho listeners.

George Wein and I were trying recently to find the right word to describe the rush of excitement that hits you when a player or a band is really cooking (a term from our youth). We settled on “thrilling.” For me, it was hearing a Lee Morgan cadenza on “Night in Tunisia” in a band that Dizzy Gillespie himself was leading, or Sonny Stitt immobilizing diners and waiters at New York’s Basin Street East with a stop-time chorus.

www.divajazz.com

Review by Ken Dryden

Sherrie Maricle and the Diva Jazz Orchestra (their slogan is “No Man's Band") released their first live CD in 2003, which is available through their web site www.divajazz.com. Sherrie Maricle, a fine big band drummer and arranger, attracts droves of talented female instrumentalists to her band, often leading to individual recording dates for her top solo-ists. This 2002 concert at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild showcases a number of great solos and tight section work throughout. “Did You Do That" is an old-fashioned battle between two tenor saxophonists, with both Anat Cohen and Schelia Gonzalez coming up winners. “Rockin' in Rhythm" is taken down a funky path by arranger Scott Whitfield (one of a num-ber of writers who contribute band charts), featuring baritone saxophonist Lisa Parrott and Cohen again, this time on soprano sax. Dennis Mackrel's scoring of “In a Mellotone" has some delicious muted trumpet by Jami Dauber and the growling trombone of Deborah Weiss, both powered by Noriko Ueda's walk-ing bass. Alto saxophonist Karolina Strassmayer has a tough act to match Johnny Hodges' many land-mark versions of “Prelude to a Kiss," but her confident interpretation stands on its own merits very well. The blazing rendition of Louis Armstrong's “Swing That Music" is a tough act to follow, but the extended workout of yet another Ellington tune, “I'm Gonna Go Fishin'", with a playful introduction in Rich Shemaria's imaginative chart and a thought provoking piano solo by Chihiro Yamanaka, proves to be the perfect finale to a great set of live big band jazz. If you haven't already discovered Sherrie Maricle and the Diva Jazz Orchestra, this is the ideal CD to make yourself better acquainted.

www.divajazz.com