TouPAC's 2006-07 season offers little of interest to jazz fans

The Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis has announced its' 2006-07 season, and jazz fans who were hoping for more and better programming from the hall in the upcoming year are likely to find the slate extremely disappointing, to say the least.

The TouPAC's jazz offerings for 2005-06 included concerts by the Glenn Miller and Count Basie ghost bands, a spring tour stop from trumpeter Chris Botti (with David Sanborn as special guest), and a special program featuring the Wayne Shorter Quartet with members of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. While not an extensive schedule, it at least touched on several jazz styles and time periods, and, with the Shorter program, offered listeners something new and of real musical substance.

Not so the 2006-07 jazz series, which will officially consist of three concerts. The first show in the series will take place on November 7, when the Jim Widner Big Band will present a program entitled "Simply Sinatra." As head of the jazz program at UMSL, Widner understandably has an inside track with the TouPAC management, and his band is stocked with competent St. Louis area professionals. If it were on the schedule in addition to, rather than instead of, a major touring attraction, this concert might make a nice lagniappe for the series. But as it stands, booking a local group instead of a significant touring act seems mostly like a way to cut expenses, since no travel or lodging costs are involved and the players are, in all likelihood, making the union minimum.

As for their proposed program, no details beyond the title have been announced, so it's hard to know what to think. Certainly, there are many fine songs in the Sinatra catalog that are ripe for new arrangements or re-interpretation; for example, saxophonist Joe Lovano's tribute album from a few years ago demonstrated that there's still interest and enjoyment to be found in a fresh instrumental approach to this well-known material.

A concert featuring different vocalists interpreting songs associated with Sinatra in their own personal styles might be interesting, too. But if the plan is simply to hire one of the several Sinatra impersonators or tribute performers currently working in the area and fire up the old charts from the Sinatra at the Sands era - well, honestly, that sounds like something better suited to one of the area's many summer concert series held in public parks, not for a jazz series at a major concert hall. Competence and professionalism do not excuse, or substitute for, a lack of imagination.

The next concert in the jazz series will be on January 21, featuring yet another ghost band, the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, in a program called "America's Hits On Parade". For those who don't know, Dorsey, a clarinetist and saxophonist who died in 1957, and his trombone playing brother Tommy, who passed away in 1956, were major stars more than a half-century ago. They had a number of hits in the 1930s and 1940s, many featuring singer Helen O'Connell, but unlike, say, Glenn Miller's "In The Mood" or Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing," most of their records will be completely unfamiliar to anyone under the age of 60. And unlike the music of Basie or Ellington, the Dorsey catalog is not studied by music students, or especially acclaimed by critics or historians.

They were simply one of many popular bands during the swing era whose impact did not reach beyond their own time. And indeed, the schedule page of the band's Web site suggests, to put it gently, that they are not exactly in high demand these days. Overall, this program sounds like it really should be playing for busloads of tourists in Branson, and, again, not part of the jazz series at what is supposed to be a major concert hall in a metropolitan area.

The series wraps up on April 28 with the most inexplicable booking of all, neo-swing leftovers Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. These obnoxious oafs are known mostly for their novelty hit "Zoot Suit Riot," and indeed, even at the height of their very short-lived popularity, they seemed to pay more attention to their haberdashery than to the quality of their music. Since the short-lived swing revival of the Nineties, they've had no hit records, nor have they done anything else to branch out musically or establish credibility with serious jazz fans, instead continuing to push the same exhausted hepcat cliches.

I have no idea what the TouPAC management was thinking when they booked these guys, since they offer absolutely nothing that hasn't been done thousands of times before by much better performers. Moreover, I suspect that at this juncture of their career, they'd have trouble filling a 500-seat club, much less a 1200-seat concert hall. Look for this show to be a poorly attended money loser.

That said, there are a couple of concerts that are part of other upcoming series at the TouPAC that may interest some jazz fans, including one featuring the vocal group Manhattan Transfer and a Steve Reich retrospective performed by members of the SLSO.

But as for the jazz series, it almost seems as if it were booked by someone either completely ignorant of, or actively hostile to, the musical tastes of jazz enthusiasists who have come of age in the last 50 years. Or one might speculate that there were significant budget issues, and the jazz series was, so to speak, forced to survive on the crumbs remaining on the table after all the other series were booked.

But really, given the number of worthy jazz performers who are readily available these days, and the relatively modest prices they charge when compared to pop performers, it's hard to fathom what precise combination of circumstances could lead to such a pathetic, brain-dead selection of acts. After insulting the intelligence and taste of St. Louis listeners in such an egregious manner, the TouPAC will have a long and tough road ahead if they hope to ever regain any credibility whatsoever among serious jazz fans here.