The Listening Guide
🎶 The listening guide: five albums, released during the past twelve months, chosen around a weekly theme 🎶
This week, we explore a handful of albums from jazz orchestras of varying sizes and styles. Some explore spiritual and avant-garde musical realms, while others provide a contemporary take on folk and big band jazz forms, working in groups upward of ten musicians to create densely layered and absorbing music.
Levitation Orchestra – Inexpressible Infinity https://levitationorchestra.bandcamp.com/
Patchwork Jazz Orchestra – The Light That Shines https://sparklabel.bandcamp.com/album/the-light-that-shines
Trondheim Jazz Orchestra with Sofia Jernberg & Olav Luksengård Mjelva
https://trondheimjazzorkester.bandcamp.com/.../trondheim...
Essen Jazz Orchestra– Road Works
https://umlandrecords.bandcamp.com/album/road-works
Ancient Infinity Orchestra – Solar Seasons
Album of the Week
Our album of the week is trumpeter Graham South's debut album as a leader, based upon the ‘choral Spirituals that glue together the movements of Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time’. Originally commissioned for Southwell Music Festival in 2018, South has sensitively arranged the pieces for quartet, and explains: “Working with these spirituals has led me to seek more knowledge about their history, the systematic oppression of the Black Americans who created them, and the wisdom of the songs themselves.”
Classic Album
The New Amazing Chico Hamilton Quintet – Passin’ Thru drummer and bandleader, would have turned 99 today.
‘Drummer Chico Hamilton's debut on Impulse featured his fifth Quintet, an advanced hard bop unit that sometimes hinted a little at the avant-garde. Instead of the trademark cello, the band featured trombonist George Bohanon. With Charles Lloyd (doubling on tenor and flute), guitarist Gabor Szabo and bassist Albert Stinson all contributing fresh new voices, this was a major band.’ All Music