Michael Mantler – Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 54:54 minutes | 578 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM
In 1968, composer-trumpeter Michael Mantler recorded The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. Released on the JCOA label (and subsequently distributed by ECM), this classic, groundbreaking album of composition and improvisation featured 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 digitizing his catalog, Mantler reacquainted himself with early scores, eventually envisioning fresh performances of this vintage material. With The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update, Mantler has re-imagined his 1960s music for the 21st century, with electric guitar and amplified string quartet added to the instrumentation. The Nouvelle Cuisine Big Band of energized young Europeans, conducted by Christoph Cech and featuring Mantler on trumpet, was recorded in these updated scores live at Vienna’s Porgy & Bess club in 2013. Just as the original did in 1968, the result sounds stirringly contemporary, brimming with dark majesty and a bright sense of sonic possibility.
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Michael Mantler – Comment c’est (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 51:29 minutes | 494 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM
Composer Michael Mantler’s “Comment c’est” is a song cycle for female voice and chamber orchestra, re-thinking the voice of electro-pop singer Himiko Pagnotti in an art music context. The Max Brand ensemble brings their dedication to innovative art and new forms of listening to this project, making for a powerful release dealing with a range of themes such as war, terrorism, migration, poverty and fear in the contemporary world.
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Michael Mantler – Coda – Orchestra Suites (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 54:21 minutes | 562 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM
Extending the concept initiated with his critically-acclaimed Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update album, described by Down Beat as “pretty fantastic”, Michael Mantler radically reworks music from several phases of his career. On Coda he shapes favourite pieces – a personal “best-of” – into new musical suites, now played by an orchestra comprised of both jazz and classical players. Source material is drawn from the albums 13 and 3/4, Cerco un paese innocente, Alien, Folly Seeing All This, For Two and Hide And Seek. Coda was recorded at Vienna’s Porgy & Bess Studio in September 2019, and mixed at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France.
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