Jazzman Felton swings between eras

Some musicians see huge gaps between modern mainstream jazz and the Swing Era jazz that was America's pop music before, during and after World War II.

Eric Felten, a singer and trombonist who leads three very different jazz bands in and around Washington, D.C., sees common ground - and an opportunity to use the past to further advance the present.

"The more I got to know the Swing Era music, the more I came to love it. I've been trying to find a midpoint between modern and the repertory Swing Era big bands. As a musician, I want to find something fresh in it as well," Felten said.

"It is an adventure to find a way to play music that is fresh but has the virtues of that earlier era. Something I learned I wasn't paying enough attention to when I was just in my bebop mode was melody. The more I immersed myself in the Swing Era, the more it forced me to focus more on the melody. I think of (Duke Ellington Orchestra alto saxophonist) Johnny Hodges. Just about anything that came out of his horn was a full-blown melodic statement."

Felten has taken that approach in his newest CD, "Nowhere Without You," which was released July 1 by BSD Records and New River Media. It features his three-horn, nine-piece band on six tracks and his hard-driving yet more intimate quartet on the other four cuts.

It is a follow-up to his 2001 PBS concert special "The Big Band Sound of WWII," a big band plus strings extravaganza featuring 30 musicians and singer Mary Cleere Haran that recreated the feel of a wartime USO dance.

On the new project, Felten's clear Swing-style vocals and his trombone skills are featured in band combinations that include some of the top jazz players in and around the nation's capital.

"Through my singing, I've been able to focus on having coherent melodic thoughts in my improvisations," Felten said. "There is nothing 'retro' about being melodic. It is easier to play fast bebop lines on trombone than it is to play something that is simple, melodic and beautiful.

Felten said the synergy between singing and instrumental jazz has a great history.

"It is a tremendous give and take," he said. "One of the classic examples of that was Frank Sinatra being in the Dorsey band and learning so much about phrasing and how to craft the lines he was singing through listening to how Dorsey would play a phrase. If you listened to Dorsey's playing, you heard these long, connected, beautiful phrases that go across bar lines and last far longer than you expect them to last. You hear those impossibly long phrases in Sinatra all the time."

His new album title is derived from a lyric in a featured Kurt Weill-Langston Hughes song, the clever "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed." In addition to chestnuts, Felten has included one original, "I Don't Believe That We Have Met."

Felten, 38, grew up in Phoenix, where he was able to study trombone with his grandfather, Lester Felten, who was a veteran of several Swing Era big bands.

His singing grew out of his immersion in instrumental jazz, where his trombone heroes were the late modernists J.J. Johnson and Frank Rosolino. His first album was released on the respected European label Soul Note in 1993, four years after the International Trombone Association named him best new jazz trombonist.

"As an improviser, you have to do more than run scales that make the chord changes. Every improvisation has to say something, to try to be melodic. If an improvisation isn't coherent, it is missing something," Felten said.

"A lot of the jazz that is successful these days is vocal jazz. There is something for people to hang on to. The singing has informed how I have approached my playing over the last several years. The playing has directed my phrasing as a vocalist. The goal is to get to a point where they are indistinguishable.

"It gets to be more and more fun all the time. How do you do music that is artistically pleasing and challenging and makes people happy? You never forget the Count Basie Band swinging away. That sound puts a huge smile on your face. It has been a real joy to me to make music that puts a smile on people's faces or helps a romance in bloom.

"I want to continue to try to enjoy all to the different types of ensembles that mainstream jazz allows, " he said, "not just think about the three bands I now have."