The NEC Jazz Orchestra sings “Happy Birthday” to Charles Ives at Jordan Hall on Thursday, 17 October 2024.

Ives is dead though (1874-1954) so why do people insist on calling these sorts of things “birthdays”?

The guy hasn’t had a birthday since maybe 1954.

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The 150th birthday of great American composer Charles Ives at Jordan Hall!

Jordan Hall is one of those odd old concert halls that could not and should not be built today. It’s an ADA nightmare. The entire floor plan bucks and bows like an old wooden ship on stormy seas. If you have a wheelchair, spin a “180” and zip off in the opposite direction at full speed.

But is it a beautiful concert hall? Gorgeous. With the kind of detailed ornament that’s a sweet dream of a bygone era when there was a more vibrant and upwardly-mobile middle class with enough spending money to demand a little luxury (but not too much!) out of their public music halls.

The program for the evening was all Charles Ives, the American composer who arrived at some of the same modernist musical conclusions as his avant garde counterparts in Europe, all while carrying on as an insurance executive in Connecticut.

He’s not a jazz guy, but he composed during the jazz era, and conductor Ken Schaphorst arranged a bill of Ives’ works to fit a jazz orchestra. The fit was sometimes too snug, or too loose, and the horns tended to overpower the vocal parts. But the brass cacophony dovetailed nicely with the dissonance and discordance of Ives’ more experimental moments.

The bill as follows: