Wayne Horvitz/The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble: At The Reception

Wayne Horvitz already has lovely. It's a tool he wields with ease in his music, be it in his Gravitas Quartet of piano/trumpet/cello/bassoon, his Sweeter Than The Day acoustic quartet or the electric Zony Mash. He even brought lovely to John Zorn's shocking Naked City bands of the 1990s. Horvitz has the ability to distill music, be it classical, jazz, film, or free, down to the essence of melody and harmony.

He applies that lovely to his little big band, The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble.

The RRCME was formed in 2012 to perform a regular gig in Seattle at a club co- owned by Horvitz. Fans of his music will find many of the compositions on At The Reception familiar, as they are taken from the aforementioned bands, Zony Mash, Sweeter Than The Day, and his 4+1 Ensemble. The twist here is that the music is spontaneously re-arranged in performance by Horvitz, who conducts here, instead of playing piano. His live re-ordering of the music is based on conduction methods learned from Lawrence "Butch" Morris, who began with noted music, but then switched to pure improvisation conductions.

Where Morris eschewed order for instant composing, Horvitz favors a reorganization of already composed music. The casual listener probably could not tell that this is collective improvisation. Horvitz' methods evoke the on-the-fly performance changes favored by Charles Mingus' bands and the ICP Orchestra. The beauty of this music is the distance these fourteen musicians get from the head-solo-head tradition and their collective approach to music making. The pieces are efficient and effective. They swing hard and are slathered with that lovely.