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Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Tidal Currents: East Meets West
by Jack Bowers
When it comes to appraising contemporary big bands, Canada's Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra is on equal footing with the best of them. For its seventh album, Tidal Currents, the WJO has engaged two of that country's leading jazz composers, Jill Townsend and Christine Jensen, to present in musical terms impressions of places that have a special meaning to them, in particular the bodies of water that inspired them in their younger years and up to this point in time.
read moreWinnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Voices: A Musical Heritage
by Jack Bowers
No matter where in the world one looks, there is musical history worth exploring and celebrating--which is what the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra sets out to affirm on its sixth album, Voices: A Musical Heritage. Winnipeg is the capital of Canada's Manitoba Province, and Voices pays tribute to the area's rich and expansive musical fabric via a series of eight compositions designed to exemplify some of Manitoba's far-flung heritage: First Nations, Metis, Ukrainian, Jewish, Chilean, Brazilian, Nigerian and Icelandic.
read moreWinnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Twisting Ways
by Jack Bowers
For the better part of its latest recording, Twisting Ways, Canada's Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra may as well scrub the word “Jazz" from its name, as the music mostly bears scant resemblance to that time-honored genre. The overall mood may best be described as funereal, epitomizing themes of a mostly exploratory nature, interrupted all too seldom by passages that are more akin to the essence of traditional jazz. As the composers, David Braid and Philippe Cote, are well-known and well-respected in ...
read moreWinnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Suite 150 / A Big Band Portrait
by Jack Bowers
To commemorate Canada's one hundred-fiftieth anniversary in 2017, the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra commissioned eleven of the country's foremost jazz composers to write music “reflecting some aspect of Canada or being Canadian." The resulting Suite 150 was performed for appreciative audiences and recorded for posterity in November 2017 and March 2018 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Besides writing, five of the composers double as soloists on their own themes: trumpeters Richard Gillis ("From Far & Wide") and Christine ...
read moreWinnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Suite Messiah / Steppin' Out
by Jack Bowers
Suite Messiah, recorded in 2012 and 2014, is the third and most recent album produced by the excellent Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra from central Canada, while Steppin' Out was recorded in 2007 to mark the orchestra's tenth anniversary. Whereas Suite Messiah is altogether seasonal, Steppin' Out salutes the Great American Songbook by renovating a dozen of its more memorable compositions. With that in mind, and as the recent holiday season is fast receding into the rear-view mirror, it seems proper to ...
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