Sam Butler

Tesser - C’mon admit it — you see the phrase “college fight songs,” you get a flash of halftime shows and packed bleachers on autumn afternoons, far removed from the nuanced layers of a nightclub performance in the shank of the evening.

On this album, these seemingly polar opposites find a meeting point, right at midfield. In the hands of Sam Butler and Garrett Fasig, though, there’ve been some changes made.

Butler’s arrangement of Notre Dame’s famed “Victory March” unfolds in three-quarter time — I guess the Irish are “waltzing to victory?” — with some New Orleans funk on the tail end. “Hail Purdue” is usually a fast-paced rabble-rouser, but Fasig lifts the homespun melody from its frantic tempo and improbably creates a lovely glee-club chorale. Then he gives the well-known “On Wisconsin” a minor-key makeover, turning it into a theme that would suit any James Bond caper. Butler’s arrangement of “Ramblin’ Wreck,” from Georgia Tech, uses flute to play up the melody’s Scottish roots, while on USC’s “Fight On” he finds the link between march beat and samba, then fades it into a light bossa, the better to tame the portentousness of that opening fanfare. 

And so it goes throughout this delightfully inventive tour of collegiate athletics. The melodies haven’t changed — well, not that much — and the songs remain instantly recognizable. (Well, almost instantly.) But you haven’t heard them like this. And that’s the whole point: bringing a new perspective to music written a century ago, for a notably different purpose, and letting a team of savvy improvisers run wild.

As it turns out, the college fight songs of yore and the jazz sensibilities of today have more in common than it seems at first glance. Says Butler, “Interestingly, these songs, except for the more modern ones, take their emphasis from the early march form” — the idiom popularized in the late 19th and 20th centuries by John Philip Sousa. Not coincidentally, that’s about the time that most collegiate anthems were composed; Sousa himself wrote a half-dozen or more.

And as any jazz historian can tell you, marches and parade music supplied an important thread in the early jazz tapestry, lending their influence in terms of instrumentation and tempo — and even their content — to New Orleans street music. “A lot of these songs are not that far from the origins of early jazz,” Butler explains. “We all have a concept of modern marching bands, but once we dug into the music, we started to find a lot of commonalities. It’s more closely related than we thought.”

“Tiger Rag” offers the perfect intersect: a hit jazz tune that made its way to the gridiron. First recorded in 1917, it became synonymous with jazz in the music’s infancy, and it remains a clichéd signifier for the Jazz Age itself. But in 1926, the Louisiana State University Tigers adopted it as their fight song, and a century later, the band still plays it before each home football game (a scene repeated at practically every high school and college that has a tiger for its mascot).

In 1954, Dave Brubeck famously documented his tour of college campuses with an album titled Jazz Goes to College. Seventy years later, Butler and Fasig, along with the members of this estimable septet, have brought college to jazz, turning fight songs into love songs, frantic marches into cool grooves, and somehow getting “rah, rah, rah” to “swing, swing, swing.”  

Go team.