Friday, December 9, 2016
Noctetts Heroes Trilogy and their own complete trilogy reupped by request
Noctetts Heroes Trilogy and their own complete trilogy reupped by request
Included here are the following: Contrasts (1979), Full Score (1980), and their best work, Heroes Trilogy (1982).
Long long ago I posted the first two with rips (here and here) now long since dead I feel probable but omitted the last which ironically was their most well-rounded and enjoyable set of compositions.
Today its nice to listen to all three as a trilogy and explore the evolution of the compositions, which as mentioned before spring mostly from the mind of trombonist / bandleader Peter Herborn.
The big band sound is quite agreeable thanks to the lack of standard American jazz cliches combined with the influence, as always in European jazz, of the core classical music education. And by this time of course the progressive tendencies in German jazz were very strong, insurmountably so presumably (unlike the case in the split-off Western half of the former Pangaea). The cover of Heroes is atrocious, needless to state, and a certain turn-off for anyone who wouldnt have known anything about the grooves information content, nor the performers database. But the side b, the trilogy, composed by Herborn, is certainly impressive despite its theme: 1) Hollywood, 2) Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Marx [sic] 3) Bop for Bogey. We shall not complain about the sources of inspiration for the composer, if the end result is such a magnificent, symphonia-like oeuvre, with echoes everywhere of the modern classical compositions he might have adulated as a young man, much like my own biographical turn...
The first part of the trilogy makes my case entirely clear:
Modern dissonance, film noir soundtrack, thoughtful passages in whole tone dreams, and the added touch of a Hammond Organ in the chordal substrate (a moog solo appears in the third part): I particularly love how he transcends Gershwin in his classical-jazz hybrid style-- well, its too polite, he leaves Georges Rhapsody in Blue behind in the dirty black dust with this symphony...
As always, the tragedy in blue is that Rhapsody is heard every day in a concert hall somewhere in the world, but never Mr. Herborns work... can we not bring some justice to the art of music too?
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