Startin’ Sumthin’

Thousandth Orange begins with a very simple 4-chord progression. Nothing fancy. Nothing extravagant. Just something quite beautiful and everyday, that is enjoyed and loved and consumed and forgotten. Something you’ve probably heard before, in a pop song or a music theory class. While considering my love of Brahms’ piano quartets and my memory of playing them—and more generally how our memories of beloved music evolve over time—I began thinking about the history of still-life paintings. Those bowls of fruit we see framed in museums—sort of lovely and banal, at first glance, but then richer when considered in the long story of humans painting things that they see, over and over and over again. There’s a reason that Van Gogh painted those vases of sunflowers again and again, or Caravaggio his fruit. Maybe after the tenth, or the hundredth, or the thousandth time one paints, or looks at, or eats, an orange (or plays a simple cadential figure), it is just as beautiful as the first time. There is still more to see and to hear and to love. More angles reveal themselves—more perspectives and corners and stories, more understanding—more appreciation of something that most would consider unremarkable. Thousandth Orange is about these tiny oblique revelations that time’s filter can open up in a musical memory. The title also suggests a thousand different shades of the color orange, or the image of a thousand oranges, or perhaps a thousand ways of looking at an orange.

Suite: Portraits of Josephine is a musical memoir, dedicated to Ms. Baker, the legendary expat entertainer from the Harlem Renaissance who lived in Paris. The movements chronologically describe significant milestones in Josephine Baker’s life, her humor, and quick rise to fame. The wind quintet version is in four short movements, and the entire original suite can be heard on Imani Winds’ album, A Life Le Jazz Hot.

Commissioned and premiered in 2012, Startin’ Sumthin’ for the Monmouth Winds was part of a fundraising initiative by the Imani Winds quintet. Written by Jeff Scott, this five-minute composition was originally scored for a wind quintet and pays homage to jazz music in the 1930s and third-stream music which was heard in the streets of New Orleans. As the 20th century progressed, more and more composers incorporated jazz into their classical music compositions. But the two styles, jazz and classical music, remained largely separated until the middle of the century when this style of music progressed to a point where it became a distinctive style of music. In 1957, Gunther Schuller coined the term “third stream” to identify the fusion of jazz and classical music. Other notable composers such as Gershwin, Stravinsky, and Copland have also integrated jazz into their compositions, which has become a growing trend over the last fifty years.

Startin’ Sumthin’ is a swing-era-influenced work that could have been heard in juke joints all around the country that people would get up and dance to. When approached to compose a piece for a wind quartet, Scott wanted to break out of the standard “basic canon or Hindemith style” way of composing for a wind quintet. Scott took this opportunity to introduce wind quartets to this time period of jazz because to him, this style of jazz is easier to absorb for the musicians and audiences alike. The style of Startin’ Sumthin’ would be most consistent with the music by Billy May and Count Basie in the big band era.

Startin’ Sumthin’  is a modern take on 1930s swing jazz and meant to be a fun retro-ride. To arrive, take the Louis Jordan highway, merge onto the Lionel Hampton causeway, turn right on the Jump Jazz expressway and exit when the harmonies start to get a little coarse and dense.

This quartet is famous, above all, for its scintillating “Gypsy” finale, yet it is a landmark work from the first note to the last.  Together with its companion piece, the Piano Quartet in A major (Op. 26), it is among the earliest products of what Brahms’ biographers call the composer’s “first maturity.”  Here the 28-year-old composer made some spectacular advances in terms of harmonic richness and structural complexity.  Even more important is a widening of the range of emotions expressed in the music, from emotional turbulence to boisterous play and all the shades in between.

In the first movement, moments of intense passion and great tenderness alternate as the music wends its way through a sonata form of gigantic proportions.  This expansive and contrast-ridden movement is followed by an Intermezzo–a name referring to a lyrical piece in a slower tempo, which Brahms used here for the first but certainly not the last time.

Next comes a gentle instrumental song with echoes of a military march as its middle section which, with its vitality, prepares the ground for the celebrated Rondo alla Zingarese.  Brahms had been introduced to the art of Hungarian Roma musicians by two violinist friends, Eduard Reményi and Joseph Joachim; he had the wild accents and fiery melodies of these folk virtuosos down pat.  Yet he added many spices of his own making to the mix, and offered a perfect imitation of the cimbalom (the Hungarian hammered dulcimer) in the brilliant piano cadenza.

© 2026 Peter Laki