Customer Reviews

Ceremonies of Forgiveness

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This is a big band album for the new millenium. The compositions, arrangements, and playing are all top notch. The style is cutting edge without being gratuitously noisy. I have had the good fortune to see them live several times, and am of the opinion that this is a great band.

I was already excited about this one just looking at the personnel, even though none of the players in this 14-piece Philadelphia big band is especially well-known. A lot of the bandmembers have seen service in Odean Pope's Saxophone Choir (including the powerhouse drummer Craig McIver); Zankel & saxophonist/flutist Elliot Levin both have been regular members of Cecil Taylor's big band projects, as well as helming some interesting discs under their own names; Dan Scofield & Brian Rodgers are the two horns in Shot x Shot, one of the hottest young jazz groups around at the moment (Scofield's also in the Sonic Liberation Front); Tom Lawton is an inexplicably underrated jazz pianist, comfortable with everything from the mainstream to the avantgarde, whose CD _Retrospective/Debut_ also appeared on Dreambox Media (trumpeter John Swana, a key presence on Lawton's disc, also features on Zankel's disc). Guitarist Rick Iannacone is a new name to me, though like other players here he's worked with the incomparable Philly harmolodic-funk rhythm section of Jamaaladeen Tacuma & G Calvin Weston. -- So what's the album like? Funk & jazz & a little African beat are the the main ingredients: it's stomping, roof-raising music, with some impassioned soloing from everyone. If you're looking for tasteful, luminous Gil Evans-style scoring or genial Ellington/Basie swing, this isn't the disc for you: the sound of this disc is somewhere between an R'n'B album and a Sam Rivers big band date. I could actually have used a little more free jazz (there's only a brief example, at the start of the 3rd piece), but that's a minor quibble. The band's been together since 2001, so this sounds like a _band_, not just a bunch of musicians brought together for a one-off project: it has the right balance of togetherness & looseness that escapes many contemporary big band albums. Recommended listening--one of my favourite recent big band releases, along with Joey Sellers' (very different) _El Payaso_.