Pacific Jazz Orchestra: Wading in Walden’s Musical Pond

It was around 15 years ago that jazz composer/arranger/bandleader Chris Walden brought his big band to SOhO for a third concert, cramming a full ensemble onto the club’s then still-tiny stage — with a couple of the musicians spilling over. That was not long after Walden had left his native Germany – where he’d started out as a staff arranger for the Hamburg Radio big band at 19 – to take on America, and more specifically Hollywood. The SOhO shows took place before he’d fully established himself in Tinseltown as a multi-hyphenate arranger and producer.

“German audiences think in boxes, so there’s very little crossover in music styles and genres, which is partly why I admired the American music industry,” Walden recalled about his move to L.A. “Any time I was doing a project that wasn’t a big band, I couldn’t use my jazz skills or my affinity for jazz.”

By the time Walden returned to town last April as part of the official Granada Centennial Festival Weekend, he’d racked up a number of impressive credits. Over the years, he’s worked behind the scenes with some of music’s biggest names, including John Legend, Michael Bublé, Aretha Franklin, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Rihanna and Barbra Streisand. He has scored more than 40 feature and TV films and collaborated as an arranger and bandleader with jazz artists Diana Krall, Herb Alpert, Michael Brecker and Arturo Sandoval, to name just a few. Perhaps most prominently, Walden has served as the lead arranger for the Academy Awards six years running, as well as for the Kennedy Center Honors and American Idol. He has also guest conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

The full circle moment came two years ago when Walden founded the Pacific Jazz Orchestra, a 40-piece hybrid big band and string orchestra, composed of powerhouse studio musicians, that lets him blend straight ahead jazz and swing with soul, pop, hip hop, film music and more.

“Now that I have spent 35 years writing and arranging music for other people, I wanted to fulfill my own musical passion, which is basically adding a 20-piece string section to my old big band,” explained Walden, who has notched seven Grammy nominations. “We get to create a kind of crossover appeal.”

The PCO’s April show featured early American Idol finalist Katharine McPhee, veteran blues/R&B singer Billy Valentine and two more guest artists. The ensemble’s sophomore show on September 6 is an early gig in the 2024-25 season and features guests John Pizzarelli, a guitarist-singer whose own tastes run from the Great American Songbook to interpretations of songs by Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Tom Waits, among others. The show also featured Sy Smith, aka the “Queen of Underground Soul”, for an edgy, progressive mix of funk, neo-soul and R&B. Future shows will include Brazilian superstar Ivan Lins and a Congolese singer-songwriter.

“It’s such a passion for me to be able to sink my teeth in as an arranger for all these performers,” Walden said. “And even when we do jazz standards, I arrange them in a way where I put my own stamp on them, something with a new twist such as unexpected harmonizing, new chords for well-known melodies, or a different rhythmic context. I just love the texture of strings combined with a big band’s full horn section. There’s nothing like it.”

Literally. The PCO is the only such ensemble in the country, Walden said.

“I’m so excited with how quickly this has taken off, and grateful to be coming back to the Granada, where the audience loved us.”