Jazz Articles

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Twisting Ways

by Jack Bowers
May 21, 2021

For the better part of its latest recording, Twisting Ways, Canada's Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra may as well scrub the word “Jazz" from its name, as the music mostly bears scant resemblance to that time-honored genre. The overall mood may best be described as funereal, epitomizing themes of a mostly exploratory nature, interrupted all too seldom by passages that are more akin to the essence of traditional jazz. As the composers, David Braid and Philippe Cote, are well-known and well-respected in ...

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Suite 150 / A Big Band Portrait

by Jack Bowers
August 16, 2018

To commemorate Canada's one hundred-fiftieth anniversary in 2017, the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra commissioned eleven of the country's foremost jazz composers to write music “reflecting some aspect of Canada or being Canadian." The resulting Suite 150 was performed for appreciative audiences and recorded for posterity in November 2017 and March 2018 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Besides writing, five of the composers double as soloists on their own themes: trumpeters Richard Gillis ("From Far & Wide") and Christine ...

Westchester Jazz Orchestra: Maiden Voyage Suite

by Nicholas F. Mondello
April 21, 2012

Imagine a painter, sculptor or writer attempting to recreate a masterpiece done by a Picasso, Michelangelo or Shakespeare. The task redefines challenge and chutzpah. While jazz recreations are more common than those in other arts--Clark Terry and the Chicago Jazz Orchestra's marvelous revisit (Americana Music, 2004) of the Miles Davis/Gil Evans' Porgy and Bess (Columbia, 1958), for example--little recreated music has equaled the excellence of its original source material better than the Westchester Jazz Orchestra's Maiden Voyage Suite.In ...

Westchester Jazz Orchestra: Maiden Voyage Suite

by Dan McClenaghan
September 30, 2011

Maiden Voyage (Blue Note, 1965) was a classic quintet recording from pianist Herbie Hancock, a concept album with the sea as the theme. With a clear view in hindsight, The Westchester Jazz Orchestra's re-imagination of that timeless music with Maiden Voyage Suite seems a natural. The sound of the original had oceanic ebb and flow, from gentle and tidal to turbulent and stormy, and the added harmonics of the multiple brass and reeds enhances this atmospheric.At the time ...

Westchester Jazz Orchestra: All In

by Edward Blanco
January 3, 2008

The Westchester Jazz Orchestra (WJO) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2002 to promote jazz within Westchester County, New York through jazz education outreach programs and the performance of classic standards and commissioned pieces in a series of concerts. All In is the group's debut album containing a repertoire of several jazz standards and one pop classic. A welcome addition to the big band genre, the album was recently named among the best CDs of 2007 by WBGO's Upbeat radio ...

Westchester Jazz Orchestra: All In

by Michael P. Gladstone
December 30, 2007

This is the first release from an organization that is now in its fifth year. The Westchester Jazz Orchestra (WJO) is a collective ensemble that consists of well-known jazzmen that live, work or play in this northern suburb of New York City. Many of these members have a significant number of their own albums, and represent working experience with some of the best of today's contemporary jazz big bands.

What is perhaps best about the album ...

Westchester Jazz Orchestra: All In

by Dr. Judith Schlesinger
October 12, 2007

All In is a crackling-good big band CD. It's the recording debut of the seventeen-piece Westchester Jazz Orchestra (WJO), which was founded in 2003, and it's a corker. [Note for non-locals: an easy commute to the clubs, stages and studios of New York City, Westchester (County) is home to a growing number of eminent jazz folk, like many in the WJO.]

The band is first-rate, the solos world-class, the arrangements fresh and imaginative. Special favorites include ...

Walsall Jazz Orchestra: Little Steps

by Jack Bowers
June 4, 2007

Little Steps marks another sizable step forward for Great Britain's impressive Walsall Jazz Orchestra, now entering its teen years after spinning off from the Walsall Youth Jazz Orchestra in 1994. The WJO's third album focuses for the most part on music composed and arranged by its talented young pianist Tim Amann, who wrote four of the six selections. The others are Benny Golson's “Hassan's Dream, nicely arranged by American Nicholas Beaumont, and Thomas Haines' sharp and seamless five-part suite for ...

Würzburg Jazz Orchestra: Artistry in Rhythm: The Music of Stan Kenton

by Jack Bowers
March 4, 2007

The Würzburg Jazz Orchestra, formed only two years ago by trombonist Markus Geiselhart, hit the ground running with a tribute to the late trumpeter Don Ellis and within a year had recorded its first album, Artistry in Rhythm, dedicated to the music of the Stan Kenton Orchestra. It's an ambitious start, and by most standards a good one as well. While it is clear from the opening measure that this isn't Stan Kenton, it is nonetheless a ...

The Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: WJO

by Jack Bowers
March 12, 2005

On its self-titled debut album, the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra offers the listener the best of two possible worlds--a thinking person's big band that also swings. There's a lot happening in these ten original compositions (including the two-part French-Canadian/Métis Suite), but the elaborate charts seldom interrupt the band's essential purpose, to present high-caliber music that is not only aesthetically pleasing but viscerally captivating as well.

Pianist Michelle Grégoire wrote the evocative Suite, as she did the almost-blues “Minor Alterations," while trombonist ...