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Joan Reinders
Marjorie Barnes & Millennium Jazz Orchestra: Both Sides Now
by Jack Bowers
Marjorie Barnes, a native New Yorker who has been living in Europe for almost fifty years including several decades in the Netherlands, summons her many years of experience to brighten and embroider Both Sides Now, her impressive debut recording with the world-class Millennium Jazz Orchestra (MJO). Barnes sang in the mid-1970s with the multiple Grammy Award-winning ensemble, The Fifth Dimension, and has worked with such luminaries as Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr., Billy Eckstine and many others. She ...
read moreMillennium Jazz Orchestra: Bleeding Amazonia
by Jack Bowers
Bleeding Amazonia, the latest album by The Netherlands' superb Millennium Jazz Orchestra, offers clear proof that “music with a message" need not be barren nor bland. Amazonia is a vibrant and colorful eight-part suite by composer / arranger Joan Reinders, whose disheartening theme is the loss of the Amazon rainforest. Four of its movements have lyrics based on verses by the Brazilian poet and environmentalist Thiago de Mello, while a fifth has lyrics by Brazilian-born vocalist Lilian Vieira who has ...
read moreMillennium Jazz Orchestra: Octopus
by Jack Bowers
Octopus, the tenth album released by the Millennium Jazz Orchestra in its nearly twenty-five years of impressive music-making in The Netherlands, is actually an eight-part suite by composer / arranger Joan Reinders devoted to one of the sea world's more fearsome and enigmatic creatures. The thematic essay spans the whole nine yards, from “Evolution" and “Environment" to “Food," “Procreation" and several diverting stops in between. It was recorded in concert in May 2018 at Theater Bouwkunde Deventer. ...
read moreMillennium Jazz Orchestra: Lookin' East
by Jack Bowers
The Netherlands, with a population less than that of New York State, is home to no less than four of the world's most accomplished jazz ensembles--the Metropole Orchestra, the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw, the Ebony Big Band and the Millennium Jazz Orchestra whose latest album, Lookin' East, does nothing to subvert its status as a member of the Big Four. Indeed, there is ample cause to argue that the MJO belongs at the very top of that plateau, steep ...
read moreMillennium Jazz Orchestra: Safety Zone
by Jack Bowers
With the release of its eighth album, Safety Zone, the Millennium Jazz Orchestra from the Netherlands marks its twenty-fifth year under the astute guidance of composer / arranger Joan Reinders who formed the band in 1989 and recorded for the first time two years later. As interesting as the orchestra's growth as a unit has been during that span, Reinders' development as a composer / arranger is even more so. Based on what he has produced here, one impression that ...
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