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About Danish Radio Big Band

Album Review

The Frames project, led by Grammy-nominated Japanese composer and conductor Miho Hazama, features the Danish Radio Big Band. It is inspired by the band's lineage of previous musical directors, who have included Thad Jones, Palle Mikkelborg, Bob Brookmeyer and the late Jim McNeely, under whom Hazama studied upon her move to New York. The album carries a dedication to his memory. Hazama, a prolific composer with a substantial body of work for numerous international orchestras, explains the background ...

Album Review

Danish Radio Big Band: Jazzin' Around Christmas

Read "Jazzin' Around Christmas" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
December 8, 2016

Despite the fact that Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Dave Brubeck all successfully recorded Yuletide songs, jazz still enjoys a problematic relationship with the so-called festive season. The trouble no doubt is that Christmas is so quintessentially square or unhip. What self-respecting hipster would dream of walking in a winter wonderland or taking a ride on a sleigh drawn by Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Nonetheless, the Danish Radio Big Band have fearlessly come up ...

Album Review

Danish Radio Big Band: A Good Time Was Had By All

Read "A Good Time Was Had By All" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
July 25, 2016

To mark its fiftieth anniversary in 2014, the Danish Radio Big Band produced a wide-ranging six-CD set encompassing highlights from the years 1964-2014 while spotlighting a number of well-known guest artists from the U.S. and elsewhere. The band is heard in studio and in concert, at home and abroad, and is sometimes referred to as the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra (having begun life as the New Radio Dance Orchestra). All of the material herein has been previously ...

Album Review

Danish Radio Big Band: Spirituals

Read "Spirituals" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
November 7, 2014

There is a curiously old fashioned feel to this, first album of a new era for the Danish Radio Big Band under its freshly appointed leader, Norwegian Birger Carlsen. The white folks sit on the veranda of “the big house" sipping their mint juleps as “their" blacks happily pick cotton and sing about dat wonderful day when they gwine to put on their shoes and walk all over God's heaven...sorry, heb'n. In an age ...

Extended Analysis

Danish Radio Big Band: A Good Time Was Had By All

by Chris Mosey
October 24, 2014

To paraphrase Shakespeare, there is something rockin' in the state of Denmark. It's the Danish Radio Big Band, best of its kind in Europe, indeed--depending on who is conducting and the mood of the players--on occasion best in the world. Against all the odds in these cash-strapped times, the DRBB, as it is universally known, is celebrating its 50th birthday. This six-CD box set commemorates the event, tracing the band's story from its rather shy birth in ...