GO Jazz Big Band swings The Beatles

As the GO Jazz Big Band, clad in black, filed out of the exit from the stage and into the halls of West Ranch High School’s Theater during their intermission, some headed straight to the green room while others hung out in the halls.  

The conversations ranged from critiques on how the performance was going, to an often talked about subject among musicians – The Beatles are still, 60 years later and with all their fame, musically underrated. 

“I think The Beatles are very, in terms of their technical ability, very underrated as far as things go,” said Macrae Eckelberry, trumpeter for the band. “They’re really talented musicians.” 

“I think people are just looking at it on the surface level instead of going deep and diving into the music,” said trombone player Jonathan Osterloh.  

While not directly connected to West Ranch’s jazz program, the GO band is led by Brian Leff, director of jazz studies at West Ranch. Leff said the setlist for Sunday’s performance of 14 Beatles songs was a difficult one to choose. The band featured five saxophones, five trumpets, four trombones, a piano, a guitar, a bass and the drums – and while not all of The Beatles’ catalog has been arranged for a big band, most of it has, meaning there’s still a lot to choose from.  

“It’s such a tough decision. I knew I had to narrow it down to 14, two sets of music,” said Leff.  “The fun thing about picking the songs for all of the concerts is I get to pick my favorites. So I went to the favorite songs that I like and I listened to a lot of different jazz band arrangements to hear what works well, what translates well, so I’m picking partly based on what’s available… so it’s a little bit more limited in selection, but I pick the ones that I like.” 

While a melody held a thru-line throughout any given piece, the chords and song structure would often deviate – but not to the point of being sacrilegious to a Beatles fan – and allowed the accentuation of the band’s full potential, especially during solos or improvisations.  

One example of this was during the GO Band’s performance of “Blackbird” – a straightforward Paul McCartney acoustic tune that only featured vocals and guitar in its original recording. However, the band – using the vocal melody as a backbone – turned Gary Lindsay’s arrangement of the song into full swing, sometimes unrecognizable of its origin, to create something diverse and spectacular — at times a completely different number.  

“Arrangers, composers will put their own spin on the charts and some of them are a little bit more true to the original. Some of them have a little bit more of a big-band style, which makes it exciting for us to play because that’s what we’d like to play,” said Leff. “A composer, when they’re writing from scratch, they get to write whatever they want. When someone’s doing an arrangement, they’re taking an existing piece of music and, in order for them to kind of put their own stamp on the piece, they can’t change too much without it straying from the original, so they will find different ways to put different elements into it, like you heard that the tempo can be changed, or the style can be changed or, the chords can be changed. So that’s kind of what arrangers will do when they’re not composing from scratch.” 

The musicians said learning these new arrangements was one of the biggest challenges going into the concert.  

“Definitely the articulations of how they did it in the recording, and making sure it’s, I mean it is an arrangement, but it’s still catering to how it was performed [originally],” said Osterloh.  

“The biggest [challenge] is just learning the music. A couple of charts on there that are really, really technically challenging. But, you know, getting the style of the Beatles is also really hard and challenging,” said Eckelberry.  

While some songs allowed the original compositions to be altered and played with, some were just fine as they were. “Martha, My Dear” was one of those songs – originally written on the piano by McCartney but overdubbed with a full band arrangement by The Beatles’ in-house composer and producer, George Martin – the GO band’s version was very true to its original. But, as the musicians had learned, this still poses a challenge.  

“It’s supposed to sound like The Beatles and that’s a really hard thing to pull off,” said Osterloh.