In recent weeks I reviewed two very different “jazz” albums, one half electronica and a bit out there, one based on Jewish dance music, but left this one out as the least interesting – at first play through it seemed a mix of film score music and Bob James-style easy listening. I would now like to retract this.
I would go so far as to say that this should be first album anyone listens to if they want to get into jazz, as it runs the gamut – though prancing playfully is a better description than running – across a range of genres.
The Dutch Metropole Orkest is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year and “Arakatak” is a compilation of pieces submitted by musicians or composers to mark this fact.
The album, released exclusively on vinyl, is an absolute joy, and if while some sections makes you think of a car chase in “Kojak”, others have a modern hard rock groove or a classical calm.
A piece by Dutch composer/horn player Morris Kliphuis opens, the title track, and it is orchestral jazz but with a groove. It opens with a luscious but experimental sound that could head anywhere, the first few seconds almost electronica, before the brass comes in, strings sounding like it could head East; the band working hard. It settles down to decent 70s jazz – maybe a bit “Dirty Harry driving down a canyon” in places, or the theme from “Cannon”, but also some world music sounds thanks to “Tubular Bells”-ish xylophone and a nice section of bongos that could be a Cuban son band. Yes, a lot going on, floating round the structure of orchestral melodic jazz.
“Bright Lights and Jubilations” is next, very bright and light, also a seventies television show and another orchestral piece; this is the one that wrongly led to my first conclusions. It’s “Starsky and Hutch” checking out suspects, probably with Huggy Bear in tow, but with an unexpected classical string breakdown followed by more easy listening jazz before the band comes back full “Petrocelli”; this next section is broken by a tasty guitar solo that wouldn’t be amiss on an Ozric Tentacles album.
The review will be longer than the title track’s eight minutes at this rate, so elsewhere is “Crown Jewels”, a pleasing piece of easy listening jazz that opens with glockenspiel jazz, with an electric guitar worthy of Prince, an even greater change with “Doesn’t Matter”, a slow, swelling strings piece that’s both awesome and calming (and reminded me of German composer Volker Bertelmann, who records as Hauschka).
All in all, an excellent album.
This is probably bad form in someone else’s review but the electronic jazz album, Smag På Dig Selv’s “This is Why We Lost” is outstanding, Leftfield with jazz meets Ibiza but with a powerful Palestinian folk song in the middle.
For this, see orcd.co/arakatak-album-metropole-orkest
JMC
