Lettuce: Lettuce with the Colorado Symphony

Over three decades, the Boston-born funk band Lettuce has delighted audiences worldwide and amassed a discography boasting eight studio albums and three live albums. They have shared members and concerts with the prolific jazz/funk trio Soulive, hit #1 on the Billboard Jazz chart with 2015's Crush (Lettuce Records), and been nominated for the Instrumental Album of the Year Grammy award for 2020's Elevate (Lettuce Records). With a selection of tunes spanning two decades of the band's work, the live album Lettuce with the Colorado Symphony (recorded in November 2018 but released in 2025) serves as a summary of the group's charms while bringing in a major new element to the sound. Following in the footsteps of many rock and jazz artists before them, the band achieves a symbiotic relationship with the classical musicians whose real-life string and horn parts take on roles that might ordinarily be played by synthesizers. It gives the grooves a sense of heft and majesty and makes for fun listening.

This triple-LP (or double-CD; a DVD video is also available) opens with 2016's "Mt. Crushmore," whose dramatic theme already had the feel of a biblical epic film score. The symphony enhances this, the horn section augmenting Eric Benny Bloom's trumpet and Ryan Zoidis's saxophone while the strings soar overhead. "The Lobbyist" (from 2015's aforementioned Jazz chart topper) conjures up the sound of a great 1970s heist film. Here, the Colorado Symphony strings provide lush "pads" underneath the tune's middle section while keyboardist Nigel Hall plays a mellow Fender Rhodes solo. A new arrangement of a section from Mozart's "Requiem" follows, providing a bit of kitschy fun. In "Ghost of Jupiter," from 2012's Fly (Velour Recordings), the string section follows the guitar on the fast riff, the horn section hits, providing punctuation, while flutes inject atmospheric trills in the background.

The orchestra has less to do on the vocal rave up "Move On Up," but the band sounds very tight, and Hall gets the crowd going. "Larimar," from 2019's Elevate (Lettuce Records), gets an appropriately symphonic "New Intro" here, while the main tune, featuring a great groove by drummer Adam Deitch, is enhanced by descending string lines and brass enhancements. The band has a chance to stretch out on the 14-minute "Tryllis" with some appealingly spacey interludes around the main theme, on which the orchestra uses pizzicato strings and tuned percussion that bring Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" to mind. The band's cover of Tears for Fears' 1985 hit "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" sounds fairly similar to the studio version, but the orchestra then gets its own space to create a pleasant symphonic link between 2016's "Elephant Walk" and 2012's "Madison Square," the suite clearly bringing the house down.

Lettuce With The Colorado Symphony is an enjoyable collaboration that also serves as a convenient "best of" collection of the band's tunes, performed before an appreciative audience and recorded in excellent sound quality.