The Jazz Composer's Orchestra Update

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Cat No: 3790789

Release Date: 10 November 2014

Label: ECM

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 602537907892

Genres: Jazz Contemporary

Description
With 'The Jazz Composer's Orchestra Update', the celebrated composer-trumpeter Michael Mantler has re-imagined his classic, groundbreaking 1968 album for the 21st century, with electric guitar and amplified string quartet added to the instrumentation.
The Nouvelle Cuisine Big Band of energised young European players, conducted by Christoph Cech and featuring Mantler on trumpet, was recorded in the composer's updated scores live at Vienna's Porgy & Bess club in 2013. Just as the original did in the 1960s, the result sounds stirringly contemporary, brimming with dark majesty and a bright sense of sonic possibility.

Released on the JCOA label (and subsequently distributed by ECM), the 1968 'The Jazz Composer's Orchestra' album of composition and improvisation featured Michael Mantler conducting a large jazz orchestra that included some of the era's iconic free improvisers as soloists: pianist Cecil Taylor, cornetist Don Cherry, trombonist Roswell Rudd, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, guitarist Larry Coryell, saxophonist Gato Barbieri. In the process of digitising his catalogue, Mantler reacquainted himself with early scores, eventually envisioning fresh performances of this vintage material, one of which is so stunningly captured on this new recording. Also included are new versions of material from that period never previously recorded.

Michael Mantler was born in 1943 in Vienna but his early career was in the US. Among much else, he can be heard as trumpeter on such key recordings as Carla Bley's 'Escalator Over The Hill' and Charlie Haden's 'Liberation Music Orchestra'. In 1973, he started WATT WORKS, a label devoted to the music of Mantler and Carla Bley, on which he released a string of venturesome albums featuring musicians such as Jack Bruce, Robert Wyatt, Larry Coryell and Tony Williams, Mike Stern, Pink Floyd's Nick Mason and the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, Marianne Faithfull, and the Balanescu Quartet. His most recent ECM albums are 'Concertos' and 'For Two'.
Tracklisting