Label:
Source: Cdbaby
Genre: Latin Jazz Big Band
GAB's Rating: ★★★★☆
Should
you be insane enough to want to start a Big Band…. do it in New York! A
difficult stage to climb up to and scream; cold and cruel at times but
then burning hot and loving, the Big Apple gives you all you need and
more… the finest musicians with great attitude, plenty of venues, great
audiences, good and affordable studios. In return, you give back what
you try to be best at… your music.
It was at that veteran of all venerable old Manhattan venues, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side, where my flirts with the Big Band format became a love affair, with all its challenges and intricacies. Starting off as an experimental workshop, with personnel, compositions and arrangements varying every week, some suitable for the dance needs of the crowd and some suitable for a full concert, my Bandagrande Big Band slowly but surely came of age.
It was at that veteran of all venerable old Manhattan venues, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side, where my flirts with the Big Band format became a love affair, with all its challenges and intricacies. Starting off as an experimental workshop, with personnel, compositions and arrangements varying every week, some suitable for the dance needs of the crowd and some suitable for a full concert, my Bandagrande Big Band slowly but surely came of age.
Any composer dreams to write for a large
ensemble, be it a large choir, a Symphonic Orchestra or its Jazz
version, the Big Band which offers similar resources of color and
dynamics, even though smaller in numbers. With close to twenty
individual instruments (and their doubles) the arranger takes over from
the composer and gradually starts creating like a painter, thinking in
terms of color, balances, shade, light and, well… a concept borrowed
from music by the visual arts… composition. Given such a range of
possibilities, it was only natural to encompass as wide as possible a
spectrum of music styles and idioms, from the Baroque sinfonía
concertante, visiting the inquiring language of the sixties' and
seventies’ Jazz, to the Brazilian eccentricities of a Hermeto Pascoal,
adding, of course, my own honest attempts at composing and arranging.
Because of budgetary and space issues, we were forced to divide the recording into four sessions, each of which left (almost) untouched: 1. rhythm section plus some soloists, 2. horns, 3. strings and 4. some solo overdubs. Read more...
Because of budgetary and space issues, we were forced to divide the recording into four sessions, each of which left (almost) untouched: 1. rhythm section plus some soloists, 2. horns, 3. strings and 4. some solo overdubs. Read more...
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