This week's jazz releases reviewed
El Viento: The García Lorca Project, ACT ****
It’s a tall order to blend Lorca’s poetry with an intimate folk art such as flamenco, with jazz and with western orchestral tradition, and produce a hybrid at ease with itself. Yet, drawing on 1970s precedents set by innovative producer-arranger Ricardo Pachón, arranger- composer Mendoza (who also contributed four arrangements) conducted the MO to do just that. The luxurious scale of the MO’s strings, reeds, brass and rhythm does more than merely complement the flamenco singing of guests Rafael de Utrera and Eva de Dios and the guitar of Daniel Mendez; it bridges the gap to their world. Although jazz has a smaller role in this, and time will set its own perspective on the project, Dutch arranger Niko Langenhuijsen’s orchestral settings of Pachón’s La Nana del Caballo Grandeand La Leyenda del Tiempo, and the Lorca triptych, Historietas del Viento, are particularly felicitous. www.actmusic.com
The Eye Of The Duck, Edition ***
Bassist Dave Kane is perhaps best known as part of the acclaimed trio with pianist Matthew Bourne and drummer Steve Davis, heard here at last year's 12 Points festival. That trio made a virtue of the unexpected, a quality immediately apparent on Kane's leader debut, where he's joined by Bourne, a will-o-the-wisp on Fender Rhodes, in a quintet completed by Simon Beddoe (trumpet), Simon Taylor (tenor) and Joost Hendrickx (drums). It's an edgy, stop-start, aggressive, high-energy, rhythmically adventurous mix of free blowing coalescing into form and vice versa, fired with a determination to be different and shun the conventional. With Kane's plangent, mobile bass the fulcrum for what is, soloists and all, essentially a group music, it's a pity the recording balance serves the collective improvisations of a talented, promising quintet at less than the optimum needed. www.editionrecords.com
DUTCH JAZZ ORCHESTRA
Moon Dreams: Rediscovered Music of Gil Evans & Gerry Mulligan, Challenge ***
The innovative writing roles played by Evans and Mulligan for Claude Thornhill's late 1940s big band and Miles Davis's Birth Of The Coolnonet are matters of historical record. But the splendid DJO has done more than archive duty in rescuing the pair's scores from that time, several never before recorded or significantly different from recorded versions. There are superb Evans orchestrations of an Easy Living Medley, ending with a sublime Moon Dreams, which, like his gorgeously scored Lover Manand The Happy Stranger, prefigure his work for the nonet and later albums for himself and Davis. It would be wrong to believe, also, that Mulligan wrote just the swingers so evident here for Thornhill ( Joost At The Roostwas for the Nonet but not recorded), but his marriage of bop and swing suggests he may even have influenced the great Bill Holman. Savoury. www.dutchjazz.nl
