2006/07/08
Relaxing with The Cinematic Orchestra
Playful. Complex.
Reflective. Intimate.
Elegant. Classic.
The spring sunrise...
Welcome to the nu-jazz audio painting by The Cinematic Orchestra.
Bio
The brilliantly-named Cinematic Orchestra is led by British arranger/composer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist Jason Swinscoe, who formed his first group, Crabladder, in 1990 as an art student at Cardiff College.
Crabladder's fusion of jazz and hardcore punk elements with experimental rhythms inspired Swinscoe to further explore the possibilities of sampling, and by the time of the group's demise in the mid-'90s, he was DJing at various clubs and pirate radio stations in the UK.
The music he recorded on his own at the time melded '60s and '70s jazz, orchestral soundtracks, rhythm loops and live instrumentation into genre-defying compositions, as reflected on his contribution to Ninja Tune's 1997 "Ninja Cuts 3" collection and his remixes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Coldcut tracks.
The project's full-length debut "Motion" arrived in 1999 to great acclaim, which culminated in the Cinematic Orchestra's performance at the Directors' Guild Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony for Stanley Kubrick later that year in London. Whether to categorize "Motion" as a jazz or electronica album is an intriguing conundrum, because it truly turns out to be a combination of both musical forms, and it is an unequivocally brilliant combination, at that.
Swinscoe gathered samples of drum grooves, basslines, and melodies from various recordings and artists that have inspired and influenced him (spaghetti-western composer Ennio Morricone and Roy Budd's spy film scores, '60s and '70s jazz and soundtrack scores from musicians such as Elvin Jones, Eric Dolphy, Andre Previn, David Rose, and John Morris).
He then presented the samples that he had collected to a group of musicians, the core of which consisted of Tom Chant (soprano sax, electric and acoustic piano), Jamie Coleman (trumpet, flugelhorn), Phil France (bass), and T. Daniel Howard (drums), to learn and then improvise. Those tracks, in turn, were sampled and rearranged by Swinscoe on computer to create the tracks that make up this first Cinematic Orchestra album.
The album bears all of the atmospheric hallmarks of ambient electronica, as well as Swinscoe's soundtrack inspirations and all the improvisational energy of jazz. Most of the songs are built with wave upon wave of repeated loops and instrumental phrases that work into a groove. Yet it feels at any moment as if the music is about to explode, like a steam whistle boiling to its screaming point. On "One to the Big Sea," for example, the same four-note bassline plays over and over with the same ride cymbal rhythm, but instead of seeming rote or mechanical, the riff just seems to continually bubble up and throb, slowly building anticipation and pressure.
Regardless of how they were made, though, the songs on "Motion" are by turns eerie, lush, edgy, expansive, gritty, intensely powerful, and gorgeous. Sometimes an album comes along that forces you to reconfigure and re-evaluate all of the assumptions you had previously made about music in order to realize how vast and endless the possibilities are; this is one of those albums.
Featuring a mix of jazz charts, DJ culture touches, and soundtrack-level layers of sound, Cinematic Orchestra's "Remixes 1998-2000" includes seven reconfigurations of electronica gems from the likes of Kenji Eno, DJ Krust, and Piero Umilani.
Atop their own core sound of bass, drums, and keyboards, the band deftly mixes in samples from the original tracks. The result is a loose-sounding mix of lengthy wide-screen pieces, which conjure up thoughts of Henry Mancini, John Barry, Jah Wobble, DJ Spooky, Herbie Hancock, and King Tubby.
With "Every Day", Cinematic Orchestra move beyond the electro-jazz fusion of their debut to make a record more natural, more paced, and, surprisingly, better than the justly hyped "Motion". J Swinscoe is more the arranger/conductor here than the producer, but of course, there's little need for samples or effects with such an accomplished band sharing the burden.
For the opener "All That You Give", Swinscoe and Co., plus harp player Rhodri Davies, spend a few minutes delicately paving the way for a deeply felt vocal by soul hero Fontella Bass. "Burn Out" is a lush, meditative track with a pleasantly ambling solo from Phil France on electric piano, a few appropriately cinematic-sounding horns, an age-old vocal sample, and occasional creaking static phasing through. Bass returns for another splendid track ("Evolution"), and the mighty Roots Manuva appears on a magisterial, spoken-word quasi-autobiography, "All Things to All Men".
Except for a pair of detours into highly programmed "broken beat" production, "Every Day" is a textured, acoustic work.
It was just a matter of time before the Cinematic Orchestra received a commission for a film score, but this 2003 release actually dates from 1999.
The genesis of "Man With a Movie Camera" lies in the selection committee of a Portuguese film festival, which asked Cinematic Orchestra to score their re-airing of Dziga Vertov's 1929 film of the same name, a silent Soviet documentary focused on a day in the life of an average worker.
Performed live by the orchestra, "Man With a Movie Camera" doesn't allow Swinscoe to indulge in his usual post-production magic, but it is a surprisingly adept score, with occasional bursts of on-the-one jazz-funk wailing to break it up. Scattered moments of brilliance abound, and at one point, someone on sax comes up with a brilliant foghorn recreation. The Cinematic material lies in '70s astral jazz, with evocative, tremulous work from soprano sax and violin.
Discography
- Motion (1999)
- Remixes 1998-2000 (2000)
- Everyday (2002)
- Man With a Movie Camera (2003)
The sounds and styles heard may not be revolutionary, but instead of simply pushing stylistic boundaries, Cinematic Orchestra display a real gift in making emotional, artistic music.
Playful. Complex. Reflective. Intimate.
Elegant. Classic.
The spring sunrise...
Welcome to the nu-jazz audio painting by The Cinematic Orchestra.
Bio
The brilliantly-named Cinematic Orchestra is led by British arranger/composer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist Jason Swinscoe, who formed his first group, Crabladder, in 1990 as an art student at Cardiff College.
Crabladder's fusion of jazz and hardcore punk elements with experimental rhythms inspired Swinscoe to further explore the possibilities of sampling, and by the time of the group's demise in the mid-'90s, he was DJing at various clubs and pirate radio stations in the UK.
The music he recorded on his own at the time melded '60s and '70s jazz, orchestral soundtracks, rhythm loops and live instrumentation into genre-defying compositions, as reflected on his contribution to Ninja Tune's 1997 "Ninja Cuts 3" collection and his remixes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Coldcut tracks.
The project's full-length debut "Motion" arrived in 1999 to great acclaim, which culminated in the Cinematic Orchestra's performance at the Directors' Guild Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony for Stanley Kubrick later that year in London. Whether to categorize "Motion" as a jazz or electronica album is an intriguing conundrum, because it truly turns out to be a combination of both musical forms, and it is an unequivocally brilliant combination, at that.
Swinscoe gathered samples of drum grooves, basslines, and melodies from various recordings and artists that have inspired and influenced him (spaghetti-western composer Ennio Morricone and Roy Budd's spy film scores, '60s and '70s jazz and soundtrack scores from musicians such as Elvin Jones, Eric Dolphy, Andre Previn, David Rose, and John Morris).
He then presented the samples that he had collected to a group of musicians, the core of which consisted of Tom Chant (soprano sax, electric and acoustic piano), Jamie Coleman (trumpet, flugelhorn), Phil France (bass), and T. Daniel Howard (drums), to learn and then improvise. Those tracks, in turn, were sampled and rearranged by Swinscoe on computer to create the tracks that make up this first Cinematic Orchestra album.
The album bears all of the atmospheric hallmarks of ambient electronica, as well as Swinscoe's soundtrack inspirations and all the improvisational energy of jazz. Most of the songs are built with wave upon wave of repeated loops and instrumental phrases that work into a groove. Yet it feels at any moment as if the music is about to explode, like a steam whistle boiling to its screaming point. On "One to the Big Sea," for example, the same four-note bassline plays over and over with the same ride cymbal rhythm, but instead of seeming rote or mechanical, the riff just seems to continually bubble up and throb, slowly building anticipation and pressure.
Regardless of how they were made, though, the songs on "Motion" are by turns eerie, lush, edgy, expansive, gritty, intensely powerful, and gorgeous. Sometimes an album comes along that forces you to reconfigure and re-evaluate all of the assumptions you had previously made about music in order to realize how vast and endless the possibilities are; this is one of those albums.
Featuring a mix of jazz charts, DJ culture touches, and soundtrack-level layers of sound, Cinematic Orchestra's "Remixes 1998-2000" includes seven reconfigurations of electronica gems from the likes of Kenji Eno, DJ Krust, and Piero Umilani.
Atop their own core sound of bass, drums, and keyboards, the band deftly mixes in samples from the original tracks. The result is a loose-sounding mix of lengthy wide-screen pieces, which conjure up thoughts of Henry Mancini, John Barry, Jah Wobble, DJ Spooky, Herbie Hancock, and King Tubby.
With "Every Day", Cinematic Orchestra move beyond the electro-jazz fusion of their debut to make a record more natural, more paced, and, surprisingly, better than the justly hyped "Motion". J Swinscoe is more the arranger/conductor here than the producer, but of course, there's little need for samples or effects with such an accomplished band sharing the burden.
For the opener "All That You Give", Swinscoe and Co., plus harp player Rhodri Davies, spend a few minutes delicately paving the way for a deeply felt vocal by soul hero Fontella Bass. "Burn Out" is a lush, meditative track with a pleasantly ambling solo from Phil France on electric piano, a few appropriately cinematic-sounding horns, an age-old vocal sample, and occasional creaking static phasing through. Bass returns for another splendid track ("Evolution"), and the mighty Roots Manuva appears on a magisterial, spoken-word quasi-autobiography, "All Things to All Men".
Except for a pair of detours into highly programmed "broken beat" production, "Every Day" is a textured, acoustic work.
It was just a matter of time before the Cinematic Orchestra received a commission for a film score, but this 2003 release actually dates from 1999.
The genesis of "Man With a Movie Camera" lies in the selection committee of a Portuguese film festival, which asked Cinematic Orchestra to score their re-airing of Dziga Vertov's 1929 film of the same name, a silent Soviet documentary focused on a day in the life of an average worker.
Performed live by the orchestra, "Man With a Movie Camera" doesn't allow Swinscoe to indulge in his usual post-production magic, but it is a surprisingly adept score, with occasional bursts of on-the-one jazz-funk wailing to break it up. Scattered moments of brilliance abound, and at one point, someone on sax comes up with a brilliant foghorn recreation. The Cinematic material lies in '70s astral jazz, with evocative, tremulous work from soprano sax and violin.
Discography
- Motion (1999)
- Remixes 1998-2000 (2000)
- Everyday (2002)
- Man With a Movie Camera (2003)
The sounds and styles heard may not be revolutionary, but instead of simply pushing stylistic boundaries, Cinematic Orchestra display a real gift in making emotional, artistic music.
Etiquetas: downtempo, lounge, nu-jazz
by Frederico Dinis [23:57]
