THE TUXEDOS and tennis shoes. The mixture of classics and jazz, sometimes in the same piece. The costumed version of "Carmen," complete with a bull in the "Toreador's Song."
It's safe to say Abravanel Hall has not seen the likes of the Canadian Brass before.That oversight will be corrected Monday, May 3, with a concert by the celebrated quintet at 8 p.m. Sponsored by the Utah Symphony, it will feature the patented blend of artistry and showmanship (including the irreverent commentary) that have not only made them a household word the past two decades but helped make the brass quintet itself a major force on the American concert scene.
And according to them, it all began with a series of school concerts.
"We were in Toronto in 1970 and all knew each other," recalls trombonist Eugene Watts, one of the group's two surviving founding members, "and we decided we'd like to play together. We began by doing Young Audiences programs in the schools and found that we enjoyed relating to the audience and basically decided to see how far we could go.
"Well, we discovered that in those days adults almost knew less about brass than the kids, so that with a little bit of change we could basically do the same thing we had been doing in the schools. And everyone had been talking about our school concerts. I remember when we first started doing the regular concerts and a sponsor would call us and say, `We're so happy you're coming. But you're going to do that piece where you stand on the chairs, aren't you?' We haven't looked back since."
In the interim have come more than 25 recordings, the latest of which, "Red Hot Jazz," has just been issued by Philips; a schedule of more than 100 concerts annually; their own publishing house; and two years ago the launching of a line of instruments, the Canadian Brass Collection, most of them turned out to their specifications in Elkhorn, Wis.
"The music we play requires a very versatile instrument," observes the CB's other charter member, tuba player Charles Daellenbach, "not only Bach and Beethoven but Dixieland and jazz. So the instruments themselves became part of where we wanted to take the brass quintet."
As Daellenbach tells it, that was to America at large and, by extension, the world.
"I see no reason why the brass-instrument formation - trumpets, trombone, tuba and French horn - cannot become a mainstream musical event of the highest quality and the highest interest. Somehow people respond to them emotionally. And because of the unique program we offer, we seem in a sense to have brought them back to the concert stage. Because from what we can tell in the '20s and '30s there were artists tromping all over the U.S. playing very mixed programs. The idea of the specialized recital didn't really come along until the '50s and '60s. And while it's still there, people's tastes tend to be much more eclectic."
Still, it took a while to make those inroads on the musical establishment.
"When we started, in 1970, we were the first brass quintet to devote 100 percent of our energies just to being a brass quintet," Daellenbach says. Even the members of the highly regarded New York Brass Quin-tet, dating from the 1950s, had regular full-time jobs, as it were. "Also - and a lot of brass players wince when I say this - compared to the string-quartet literature ours would have been maybe class-B or class-C music. So we also had to build a core repertoire."
Through commissions and arrangements the effort was successful enough that within a decade they became the first brass quintet to play Carnegie Hall, in April 1980.
"That was what really established us as a major attraction," Daellenbach recalls. "It heralded a new age for brass and meant a whole flood of groups could come into halls and we, instead of playing chamber-music halls, started playing 2,000-to-2,500-seat halls."
And not just in this country. To date tours have taken them to Europe, Japan, Australia, the Middle East, even the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
"I remember when we first went to Germany," Watts recalls. "The sponsors told us they were very serious in Germany and they just wanted us to play a serious concert. So we told them we would do what we normally do and if they didn't like it we wouldn't come back. Now our career in Germany is almost equal to the one here, around 40 concerts every year and a half."
Daellenbach, who, with a doctorate from Eastman, more or less functions as the group's resident musicologist, admits it's not always an easy balance to strike.
Asked if there's anything the group won't do to reach an audience, he responds: "We'll never tamper with the music itself, and always give it its appropriate performance. For example, although we have some classy arrangements in which Bach has been jazzicized by Luther Henderson, we wouldn't take a Bach fugue and distort it. With Fats Waller, though, it is well-documented that he had a lot of fun with the music and with his audience.
"By the same token we realized from the first that we would need to create an audience that would not only enjoy the concert but would want to return. Otherwise we would have a very short life. So in the discussions we have before we play a piece, our intention has been to provide aural signposts, so that when we play something like the Bach Passacaglia and Fugue and I talk about the repetitions it sounds quite funny. But once we play it, they can see exactly what we meant.
"It's delivered in a sort of humorous way because that's the only way I know how to discuss it. Fortunately our personalities have somehow connected with the audience. If they hadn't, we'd have been in trouble, because we weren't acting and couldn't go back and change it."
Other members of the quintet are trumpeters Frederic Mills and Ronald Romm, and David Ohanian, French horn.
Tickets for Monday's concert are priced from $14 to $30 and are available at Abravanel Hall or any Smith'sTix outlet. For information call 533-NOTE.