Anders Koppel: Mulberry Street Symphony

A father-son collaboration at its most sublime, Mulberry Street Symphony is a natural and logical extension of saxophonist/composer Benjamin Koppel's eclectic sets of funk and free improvisation The Ultimate Soul & Jazz Revue (Cowbell Music, 2020) and The Art of the Quartet (Cowbell Music, 2020). The prolific Dane wisely aligns himself here with redoubtable counterparts in the persons of bassist Scott Colley and drummer Brian Blade to form the core of a larger musical aggregation including the Odense Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martin Yates. In doing so, he allows for consummate flexibility in the interpretation of his father Anders' ambitious piece inspired by the photographs of fellow countryman Jacob Rils.

Composer Koppel (who plays Hammond organ on the finale here "Puerto Rican Rumble") professes not to have written this seven-part opus as a programmatic piece. And he left Koppel, Colley and Blade to play off the strictly-arranged sections with all the well-honed spontaneous chemistry at their disposal. As a result, the various and sundry interactions between the trio itself and the threesome with the orchestra, on for instance, "The Last Mulberry," are highly energized and nothing if not cinematic (in the true sense of the word, not its cliched variant).

Trade-offs between woodwinds and bass in particular conjure the detail redolent in the cover graphics. There's no shortage of comparable imaginative passion in the musicianship of the Koppel/Colley/Blade nucleus either: the fleet and fanciful interactions on "Bandits' Roost" proffer music as evocative and picturesque as any incorporating the whole ensemble or the orchestra on its own majestic flights, say, during "Tommy The Shoeshine Boy." It's a wonder the audience was able to contain its acclamation til the end, at least in how the recording was edited; Preben Iwan's engineering and mixing otherwise insures the audio subtleties are readily discernible throughout, whether it's the ebb and flow of the orchestra or the procession/recession of the trio, individually or collectively.

Many such instances are spread across the two compact discs in this set, the plethora of such moments indicative of the wellspring of inspiration at the heart of the work. And the expanse of the latter track, running over eighteen and half minutes, allows for a plethora of detail in both arrangement and performance: it is no more padded for effect than shorter cuts such as "Blind Man" or "The New House" are unduly constricted. As a result, the concise nature of those comparatively abbreviated numbers, clocking just over six and seven minutes respectively, effect a dramatic contrast as the mood(s) grows increasingly dense in the wake of "Stranded in the Strange City" commencing this magnum opus.

Black and white images captured by the aforementioned famed photographer and social reformer adorn this double-fold glossy package. These are in addition to the inner panorama of the musicians at work in the concert house where this ninety-minutes plus music was recorded. In sum, this combination of music, text and photos that is Mulberry Street Symphony makes for a sum of content equal parts engrossing, thought-provoking and invigorating.

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