The Pacific Jazz Orchestra, founded in 2022, caps its second season on May 29 with a concert at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. A hybrid big band and string orchestra heralded for its wide-ranging and exciting performances, the 40-musician ensemble will perform a program spanning jazz, swing, and the Great American Songbook, with vocalist Tierney Sutton and Israeli-born clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen joining as soloists.
Composer-arranger Chris Walden is PJO’s artistic director and conductor and also has seven Grammy Award nominations to his credit. “I’d been writing music for other people throughout my career — more than 35 years,” he said, explaining the band’s genesis, “I was blessed to write big-band arrangements for Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin. But I always had this idea and vision for my own orchestra. And the unique thing about the Pacific Jazz Orchestra is that it’s not a symphony orchestra playing pop music — or a big band that has no strings — but it’s a hybridization: a full 17-piece big band, plus a 20-piece string section, including a harp.”
Walden — who grew up in Hamburg, West Germany, playing piano and trumpet and graduated from the Cologne University of Music before moving to Los Angeles at the age of 29 — has also scored more than 40 films, as well as having worked as an arranger and bandleader for such artists as Diana Krall, Herb Alpert, and Arturo Sandoval. Walden didn’t need to hold auditions for the PJO.
“These are all musicians I’ve worked with for the past 20–30 years,” the conductor pointed out. “A lot of them said, ‘Great idea. I’m on board.’”
When The Wallis asked Walden to highlight women in jazz for this upcoming program, he called in Sutton, whom he’s known and worked with for 25 years. Looking to pair the vocalist with another guest, he took Sutton’s suggestion to invite Cohen, who’s based in New York.
Thursday’s concert is set to feature some of Walden’s compositions, while Cohen performs her original tunes as arranged by him. Sutton, who lives between L.A. and Paris, will sing well-loved standards in her own style.
Walden acknowledged that there are more women jazz musicians these days — “but still not enough. When more women see other women play jazz, they get motivated themselves. I’m not sure who Anat’s role model was, but she is a role model.”
As a guest conductor, Walden has led the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Pops, and The Philadelphia Orchestra, among others, and has written a symphony, The Four Elements (2007), which he recorded with an orchestra of Hollywood studio pros. It was released in 2008 on Origin Records and received two Grammy nominations. Clips of the recording session can be seen on YouTube, as can highlights from the PJO’s concerts.
But if Walden has a bone to pick with his adopted city, it’s that L.A., unlike New York, doesn’t have an abundance of jazz clubs. The lack of good public transportation is part of the problem, he explained.
“It bugs me,” said Walden, who name-checked “Vibrato, Catalina, the Baked Potato, and one club near the airport” as local venues he frequents. “My theory is that the lack of jazz venues also has to do with the L.A. lifestyle. Going to a jazz club is not part of L.A. People here get up early to go hiking, [and] tourists go to Disneyland and Universal Studios. A city like New York has iconic jazz clubs that are still surviving: Birdland, Blue Note. There are always lines outside their doors — whoever plays.”
According to Walden, jazz today is “very vibrant — but it’s looking for an audience.”
As for the PJO, which has performed at venues like The Soraya at Cal State Northridge and the Alex Theatre in Glendale, the conductor said, “Audiences at our concerts hear and experience music in a way that they can’t anywhere else. And they leave the concert on a high and inspired.”
