Friday, August 14, 2015

Colours Jazz Orchestra Plays the Music of Ayn Inserto, Home Away From Home

The recording at hand is about a convergence, a happy coincidence of a big band residing in Senigallia, Italy and a talented jazz composer. Colours Jazz Orchestra Plays the Music of Ayn Inserto, Home Away From Home (Neuklang 4097) vividly documents the ultimate fruits of that collaboration.

Massimo Morganti's Colours Jazz Orchestra is a wonderfully precise and swinging big band with good soloists and an ensemble sound that rivals the best out there today. Ayn Inserto is a US-based artist with a real sense of the possibilities of large big band jazz, a successor in progressivity to George Russell and Gil Evans, truly.

Of the seven works on the disk, five are composed by Ayn, all are her arrangements. Joe Henderson's classic "Recorda Me" and Daniel Rosenthal's "Subo" are the arranged numbers, the rest give us the Inserto compositional way, diverse, well voiced, adventurous.

The 18-member Colours Jazz Orchestra makes for a mighty confluence of sound throughout. And they are tight, very much so!

There is an orchestrational brilliance to this music and a sense of part writing that shows a total immersion in the big band world, both cognizant of the roots and extending them outwards and upwards with originality.

Rather than give a blow-by-blow account of the music on this posting, I should probably just recommend it strongly and let you hear it for yourself. It is extraordinarily well written contemporary jazz that is more progressive than flat-out avant. Such distinctions do not mean a good deal, anyway. She is a voice out there, a real voice! Listen!

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