Lil’ Big Band
November 24, 2023
The Colony
Turkey and holiday starches are known to tank folks, but Thanksgiving is traditionally a huge day for Tulsa’s service industry. Expats travel from out of state to—and soon crave a respite from—their families. So: hit the bar.
Tulsa is a town of multitudinal tales, and The Colony is a many-storied room within our city limits. Stickers and framed posters adorn the wooden walls, with the likenesses of legends Steve Pryor, Leon Russell (who supposedly owned it in the ‘70s), and others looking on. The lit fireplace added to the holiday coziness when I headed that way recently for an ad hoc gathering of some of the city’s most adventurous musical minds.
Joining the familiar faces on the wall and in the crowd were the pedigreed members of the evening's ensemble: jazz vocalist Annie Ellicott; Luke Combs’ bassist Mat Maxwell; drummer Josh Raymer and guitarist Chris Combs, from Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and other projects; King Cabbage sax-smith, auxiliary percussionist, and trumpeter Andy “Arbie” McCormick; Kristin “Piston” Ruyle; trumpeter Bishop Marsh; and violinist Olivia McGraw.
They called themselves the Lil’ Big Band, but the first bullshit to call on that name is by mass alone. This improv ensemble was damn near Slipknot-sized, with Kristin Piston packing the talent of two jumpsuited clowns into one percussionist’s frame. In addition, to imply anything small about the members’ individual talents is beyond intellectually dishonest.
I tried to fight it as much as I could, but the first 15 minutes could not escape a comparison to Andre 3000’s recent flute album. Each member has a background in heavy-hitting music—New Orleans jazz, funk, blues, etc.—but their opening moments on this night seemed to stretch ethereally into an hour as vaporous emissions from the instruments swirled into circadian rhythms. It was the sound of waking up from a Thanksgiving leftover nap and getting to this gig. Arbie told me after the show that the crowd looked “anxious and confused.”
Cymbals shimmered, strings and horns trilled, and people visibly wondered “when are they gonna bring the heat?” Yet soon enough, Annie Ellicott let out a shriek like King Diamond, and they eclipsed The Colony’s fireplace temp with a set as funky and unpredictable as the road work surrounding the venue.
The night would prove heavy on improv, with jazz standards and cover songs reworked by the group on the fly. The first proper “tune” was Coltrane’s “Syeeda’s Song Flute,” followed by songs from artists as diverse as Lee Hazlewood and Frank Ocean. The concatenation was fastened with soul, jazz standards (of the standard and NOLA varieties), Cuban rhythms, and that goddamn “lime in the coconut” song.
All these elements fluidly manifested and rolled back into the ebbing dark. Combs pulled sounds out of his guitar like electric notes that realize they come from wood. Screaming, singing, crooning into existence, and—as he wills them—croaking into non-existence like an unplugged AI. Combs would start a lick, Arbie would echo on sax, and Bishop would confirm its right to exist in a third harmony on trumpet.
At one point, an exotic motif set atop a fierce cumbia invoked the LSD reptile scene from Fear and Loathing and laid the bedrock for “Piston” to personify her alias. Ruyle is the undeniable auxiliary engine that drives the jam of any group she’s in. With King Cabbage, she utilizes congas, woodblocks, and a coach whistle to pace the fervor, and with similar instrumentation here she and Raymer (quite possibly one of the greatest drummers from Oklahoma ever) entered a ferocious drum break.
Though the two serpentined through each other’s blasts and cues with the deftness expected of them, they embodied the overall feeling of the evening: expansion of the comfort zone. That initial “anxiety” the crowd exhibited was well worth it, their uncertainty being collateral for a night of righteous experimentation and musical riches paid back in full.
