THE MADD FOR TADD JAZZ ORCHESTRA

If the Guinness Book of World Records recognized such achievements, Kent Engelhardt would surely deserve recognition for his epic undertaking: transcribing, editing, and notating all of the legendary Tadd Dameron’s compositions. Not only well-known, frequently performed bebop anthems like “Hot House” and “Good Bait,” but also more obscure tunes like “Handy Andy (aka Gnid)” and “Super Jet.”

Not content with getting his arrangements down on paper, Engelhardt, Professor and Coordinator of Jazz Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, formed a 15-piece band, Madd for Tadd, to record them.

The ensemble’s first recording, The Magic Continues (2018), offers heady remakes of the songs from Dameron’s final album, The Magic Touch (1962), plus five other compositions. In 2017, MFT got to celebrate the centennial of Tadd Dameron’s birth by performing the magical tunes at the Tri-C JazzFest in Cleveland, the city in which he was born.  

Boosted by the positive response to that performance and their luminous recording (“If you love Tadd Dameron, this album is a must,” wrote blogger Marc Myers), MFT tripled their output with the new double-disc follow-up, Central Avenue Swing & Our Delight. It includes no less than 22 more freshly conceived treatments—half taken from material Dameron wrote in the early 1940s for Kansas City mainstays Harlan Leonard and his Rockets and half from various contributions to the bop-era playbooks of Billy Eckstine, John Coltrane, and Blue Mitchell.