Big bands (in the jazz sense of the word) are like most of the people who still listen to them: old, and clinging as stubbornly to their old ways as a codger with bad eyesight who won’t give up his driver’s licence. Rock bands with more than five players, however, have become something of a growth industry. You’d have to be blind not to notice them. Blind, or so devoted to your own thing that it’s like being in a cult. Or being a jazz musician.

“I’ve had to do a little bit of introducing,” Darcy James Argue says wryly of the players in his full-size big band, “saying, ‘here, you need to check out these records to get a sense of what to play on this stuff because it’s not standard big band jazz.’ But they’re great about that.”

 Originally from Vancouver, the composer has settled in New York, where for almost three years he’s been leading Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, an 18-piece group. (For their gigs here at the IAJE conference [see sidebar] and the Tranzac, he’s filled out the lineup with locals including Lina Allemano and Kevin Turcotte.) After finishing his undergrad at McGill and playing around Montreal, Argue moved to Boston’s New England Conservatory to study with post-swing-era big band pioneer Bob Brookmeyer. Argue’s compositions bear Brookmeyer and fellow large-ensemble champion Maria Schneider’s unmistakable influence, but his fondness for the likes of Tortoise, Explosions In The Sky and our own Do Make Say Think permeates tunes such as “Habeas Corpus,” whose layers of horns rub uneasily against drummer Jon Wikan and bassist Matt Cloehsy’s intricate post-rock rhythms. Like most open-eared musicians, Argue is less interested in genre distinctions and more in what they have in common, which for him is a sense of a larger narrative.
“One of the things that attracts me about the larger group is that you can tell more intricate stories than you can in a small group context,” he explains. The players will “surrender a little individual freedom in the service of a more elaborate and more carefully plotted musical narrative.

“I try to think really cinematically. I was reading a lot about the three-act structure versus other models of telling stories and trying to get a sense of how people do it in other mediums and what’s going to make a script fly.”

That’s easy to hear in a piece like “The Perils of Empire,” where the drummer’s entry with a lurching waltz figure halfway through a calm passage makes its point effectively, as well as wordlessly.

“There’s a bit of a game going on in there with Jon Wikan playing ridiculously bad time trying to fuck everyone else up. So obviously the metaphor there is hard to miss.”

The Secret Society’s music isn’t as confrontational as more free-jazz-oriented outfits such as Sun Ra’s Arkestra, but writing largely tonal music that resists being straitjacketed by tradition is arguably just as subversive. That’s the sort of thing a secret society ought to be doing — agitating from within.

Argue describes the concept behind the group’s name, comparing them to keepers of a lost tradition. “I really like the idea of emphasizing the anachronistic qualities of what I was trying to do. People have obviously done great things since World War II with that instrumentation, but that’s not what people think about when they think about a big band. They think of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman.”

Seeing a stage teeming with musicians indicates to most of us that we’ve wandered into an indie-rock show. For the uninitiated jazz fan, it carries a different message: “Welcome to the 21st century. We’ve been waiting for you.”