Life is a rollercoaster...
Clearly it's the 8 part postmodern vaudevillian Carla Bley 'Roller Coaster' suite that steals the show on a significant 5 LP box set of recordings spread over an hour and three-quarters that goes back quite some way collected together.
... Just gotta ride it
The Roller Coaster work was recorded in Danish Radio's studio 3 in Copenhagen 7 years ago.
The Miho Hazama material is much more recent but is still approaching 5 years old.
Marking 60 years of the DR Big Band (the LX [Roman numerals denoting the number] in the title) as an entity often it's the intimacies of soloing and subtle shifts between rhythmic bursts that matters more than loads of horns going gangbusters for broke.
A top class outfit up there certainly with Cologne's WDR Big Band and Scotland's SNJO who we reckon are the acme of European big bands out there. And this is a terrific collection.
I have heard the Danes only once - Van Morrison guested with the big band that 1990 night at the Barbican.
Warm and tactile sonics
A world away from such a blues and Celtic soul drenched Vantabulous night for a moondance here it's five commissioned highly complex multi-dimensional jazz compositions.
The band does not pummel you into submission with its consummate erudition swerving well away from tedious jazz didacticism in its unclunky execution throughout.
There are - in addition to Bley who died aged 87 last year - work from the Tokyo-born Hazama, percussion legend Marilyn Mazur and similarly 1980s vintage Milesian Palle Mikkelborg and the conductor Peter Jensen.
It's an eight year trawl meticulously documented and performed. The sonics are warm and tactile even on the stream.
The dynamic 'Sparkles' pieces are conducted by Hazama, the Bley work is inspired by Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, commissioned for a Scandinavian tour.
The Peter Jensen re-imagining of Carl Nielsen’s 'Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, Opus 57' (1928) is rather wonderful.
Aura legend hornman Palle Mikkelborg's moody 'Mind Behind' contributions also light us up inside. Switch on your own electric light by waking up to all these quantifiably engaging sounds today.
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