Column: San Diego’s Ira B. Liss and his big band make music built for smiling

The music that the Ira B. Liss Big Band Jazz Machine makes could never be called noise. But it sure is joyful.

On the new album, “Mazel Tov Kocktail!,” the San Diego-based group rolls out a rollicking batch of songs that swings from dizzying big-band showstoppers (“Gimme That,” an original by Andrew Neu) to smoky torch tunes (“You’d Better Love Me While You May,” featuring vocalist Janet Hammer), to dancefloor ready funk (“Bass: The Final Frontier,” featuring famed San Diego bassist Nathan East). There are new tunes, old tunes and even a song inspired by klezmer music, all of them set in the key of happy.

“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Your music is so fun,’ and it is so great to hear that,” said Liss, the group’s founder, conductor, producer and arranger. “It is great that our music elicits that emotion in people. Everyone wants to be happy, and if our music can create that for them, we have done our job.”

Despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has kept the close-knit band apart since last March, and there is no telling when they will be able to start performing in public again, Liss and his 17 musicians have plenty of reasons to raise a glass to themselves and their new album.

There is the fact that Liss and engineer Robert Cartwright were able to do the album’s mixing and post-production during the pandemic. There is the welcome news that “Bass: The Final Frontier,” the group’s first-ever digital single, got 3,000 Spotify streams in just its first week. There is also the not-small matter of the big band’s big anniversary.

Ira B. Liss

(Courtesy photo)

Before it was the Ira B. Liss Big Band Jazz Machine, Liss’ group was an educational experiment. After a few years studying cultural geography and music at SDSU, the saxophone-playing Liss was working in an Escondido music store. Many of his customers were students who wanted to learn more about big-band music, so Liss decided to put a group together to teach these youngsters how to play the music he had loved since he was a kid.

In the summer of 1979, the group began practicing at a local high school. As they got better, Liss and his students started playing in public. Then older, more experienced musicians wanted to join, and Liss’ unofficial summer-school project became an in-demand community band playing gigs all over San Diego. By 1994, Liss had stopped playing baritone sax in the band to become its full-time leader and its first-time record producer. The group’s debut album, “First Impressions,” was released that year.

Twenty-seven years and five albums later, we have “Mazel Tov Kocktail!,” which celebrates 40 years of the Ira B. Liss Big Band Jazz Machine and the unstoppable force of one man’s musical obsession.

“A lot of people early on were saying, ‘What, are you crazy?,’” the 66-year-old Liss said from his home in Kensington. “They said, ‘You are going to run into all kinds of pitfalls. You are eventually going to hate it and then you are gong to give it up.’ I don’t know why I keep doing it. Maybe I am crazy for doing it after all these years. It’s a passion. I can’t explain it any other way.”

That outsized passion goes all the way back Liss’ days at Patrick Henry High School, where the 6-foot-7-inch Liss was the school’s drum major and a budding jazz fiend. Fired up by the enthusiasm of band directors David Amos and Arne Christianson and inspired by albums from such jazz greats as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman and Don Ellis, Liss threw himself into big-band jazz.

Liss graduated from Patrick Henry in 1972. A few years later, he met pianist and band leader Stan Kenton during a music-clinic at Sacramento State, and his passion became his future.

“One day (at the clinic), I got the courage to start talking to him, and we ended up sitting outside the mess hall and talking for 45 minutes,” Liss remembered. “He wanted to know why I liked this music and why I wanted to do this. When I got ready to go in, he said, ‘It’s going to take guys like you, Ira, to carry on this tradition when guys like me are gone.’ That was 15 years before I started my band.

“That was a lot of motivation for me. Here is one of the biggest legends in jazz, and he is saying, ‘You need to do this.’ He must have seen something in me in that brief moment for him to say something like that. That changed my life.”

Kenton was right. Liss did need to do this. He still does. Even though Liss makes his living as a real estate agent, his heart and soul live in the music. The pandemic derailed the Big Band Jazz Machine’s busy performing schedule as well as plans to attend the Taichung Jazz Festival in Taiwan. But there is no silencing “Mazel Tov Kocktail!” or the musicians who made it happen. The album is out there, and everything that makes the band special — the musicianship, the camaraderie, the history and the happiness — is there for the listening.

“That is the whole deal. In a band, you’ve got to have great people, and everyone in this band is wonderful. It took 40 years to find the right combination, and it is such a joy to work with all of them,” Liss said. “This is the longest I have been separated from the band. I keep in touch with everybody, and they have all said to me they can’t wait until we can get back at it. We are chomping at the bit to get out there.”