AARDVARK JAZZ ORCHESTRA - Passages
Leo Records CD LR 741
21 Musicians: too much detail to record here, but Music Director, Composer and Trumpeter Mark Harveyfounded the big band over 40 years ago and has led it ever since.
This is a collection of individual recordings made live at different venues across 2003, 2014 and 2015.
Senior Lecturer in Music at Boston University, Mark Harvey has taken Aardvark on many a musical voyage and Passages is in part a tribute to Sun Ra, who was a massive stimulus to the orchestra for many years. This writer described the outpouring on a previous CD as “Exceptional music” and does not hesitate to use the same expression now. The band perform highly imaginative and varied music which is marvelously suggestive of its themes.
The compositional style creates a soundscape of highly and briskly textured channels, often polyphonic, occasionally volcanically so which brings on furious fluctuations. These in turn may segue smoothly into a calmer, cooler ambience. The textures may be somewhat modest, rather ‘thin’, but they may be expanded by additional layers from different sections of the orchestra.
Harvey can be found on over 30 albums. These include a dozen of his own compositions and arrangements with the AJO on Leo and associated labels. He has been given the soubriquet ‘Boston’s Jazz Hero for 2015’ by the Jazz Journalists Association, a title which he has certainly earned for all the work he has carried out in supporting and promoting jazz.
The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra play beautifully all the way through the album. It speaks an extraordinary dialectic, harmonious though bizarrely ruminating. Exceptional music indeed.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
Leo Records CD LR 741
21 Musicians: too much detail to record here, but Music Director, Composer and Trumpeter Mark Harveyfounded the big band over 40 years ago and has led it ever since.
This is a collection of individual recordings made live at different venues across 2003, 2014 and 2015.
Senior Lecturer in Music at Boston University, Mark Harvey has taken Aardvark on many a musical voyage and Passages is in part a tribute to Sun Ra, who was a massive stimulus to the orchestra for many years. This writer described the outpouring on a previous CD as “Exceptional music” and does not hesitate to use the same expression now. The band perform highly imaginative and varied music which is marvelously suggestive of its themes.
The compositional style creates a soundscape of highly and briskly textured channels, often polyphonic, occasionally volcanically so which brings on furious fluctuations. These in turn may segue smoothly into a calmer, cooler ambience. The textures may be somewhat modest, rather ‘thin’, but they may be expanded by additional layers from different sections of the orchestra.
Harvey can be found on over 30 albums. These include a dozen of his own compositions and arrangements with the AJO on Leo and associated labels. He has been given the soubriquet ‘Boston’s Jazz Hero for 2015’ by the Jazz Journalists Association, a title which he has certainly earned for all the work he has carried out in supporting and promoting jazz.
The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra play beautifully all the way through the album. It speaks an extraordinary dialectic, harmonious though bizarrely ruminating. Exceptional music indeed.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
