Listen to Art Farmer & The Orchestra

Art Farmer, Art Farmer And Benny Golson | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 23, 1997)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Polygram Records
• ASIN: B0000047F9
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,945 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Symphonic in its scope, June 27, 2001

By 

Dr.D.Treharne (Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Listen to Art Farmer & The Orchestra (Audio CD)

Recorded over three session in August and September 1962 this is a densely textured album of symphonic scope.Art Farmer himself plays only Flugelhorn on the sessions. Oliver Nelson wrote all the arrangements. They make use of a wide range of instrumentation that sometimes is appropriate for the material and sometimes isn't. There's no doubting the quality of the playing on the album, but it's very much of a time gone by. Standout tracks are Billy Strayhorns "Rain Check" which interestingly has a Piccolo given a strong part in the arrangement.Farmers own "Rue Prevail" provides an excellent vehicle for his playing.Perhaps best of all is John Coltrane's "Naima", where again Farmer playes some very assertive Flugelhorn.Much less successful are the two Richard Rogers tracks,"My Romance" being co-written with Lorenz Hart and out of place with the other material. Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the opening track "Street of Dreams" which comes across almost as a symphonic piece, with a dense mesh of woodwind instuments weaving around Art Farmers playing. This is an album that takes a lot of getting into, and the appeal of some of the tracks comes after several plays as ideas and themes unravel themselves. Worth checking out as an album of its own time and place.