Copied from the OUR Recordings website.
A huge congratulations to Jakob Buchanan for receiving the prestigious award as Jazz Composer of the Year for his work SONG & WIND. Congratulations also go out to the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra, the Copenhagen Royal Chapel Choir, percussionist Marilyn Mazur, conductor Carsten Seyer-Hansen, and producer Preben Iwan.
It has been an absolute pleasure for OUR Recordings to work on the release of this album with such wonderful artist.
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Song & Wind (World Premiere Recording)€17,99 – €30,99
Composer, trumpet and flugelhorn player Jakob Buchanan writes music specifically with the musicians he is working with in mind. Joining him on this important project are regular collaborators the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra conductor Carsten Seyer-Hansen and percussionist Marilyn Mazur. Together they conjure landscapes of beauty, power and sometimes deep melancholy. Mazur’s panoply of percussion function as an emotional “basso continuo,” speaking a language built out of pure rhythm while Buchanan’s solos emerge almost like ancient cantilations from the choral/orchestral textures. The Aarhus Jazz Orchestra is carefully orchestrated, and the Copenhagen Royal Chapel Choir provides an aura of ethereal beauty to this soundscape song and wind.
In every way, Buchanan’s Song & Wind is a worthy successor to his earlier award-winning Requiem, (also written with Marilyn Mazur and the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra in mind), a major work, expressive and full of beauty, drawing equally on the music of the past while charting a further course into the future.
Ever since it quietly emerged on the international scene in the late ‘60s, Scandinavian jazz carved out for itself a distinctive niche. Drawing on the influence of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Scandinavian jazz embraced a free, spacious, experimental, and contemplative aesthetic. It has also been open to modern or contemporary classical music and collaborations with European folk and ethnic-musicians.
Quotes from Reviews…
“One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star” wrote Rilke in The Book Of Pictures (1902-1906). Apt words, these, to introduce this latest work from the questing Danish composer and brass man Buchanan. As weighty as it is ethereal, as atemporal as it is diversely sprung rhythmically, Song & Wind is a splendid addition to and extension of the Davis-Evans axis in classically inflected jazz.”
Jazz Journal (UK) Michael Tucker
“SONG & WIND is unique, yet another contribution from the master of symphonic jazz, Jakob Buchanan, to the meaningfulness of life”.
Jazz Special (DK)
“An ambitious project that has been fully realized, producing music with an abundance of delights”.
Jazz Views (UK) Nick Lea
“The music was at once grand and fragile. Just like the globe, and perhaps the elegiac lay in precisely that relationship: That the human miracle – of which music is also a sublime expression – is also the fatal condition. It stops, everything. Also the music. But it was beautiful, very beautiful even, while it lasted. And the rest is silence, to use Hamlet’s words”.
***** Henrik Palle, Politiken (DK)
“The music is strongly focused and structured. Contemplative. But it is also open, experimental, and to some extent eclectic. This last aspect especially thanks to Mazur’s efforts”.
***** Gaffa (DK) Ivan Rod
“While this album by Jakob Buchanan may not be a production that fits inside of a progressive rock context, and perhaps not even inside a progressive spectrum, it is a stunningly beautiful album that does come with qualities I know there are people in the progressive rock universe that will appreciate. The combination of some standard jazz movements, Latin inspired rhythms and sacral classical vocal traditions approached and executed in more of an orchestral manner is breathtaking at its peak, and competent and solid elsewhere. This is a quality production on all levels, and those with an interest in a sacral sounding combination of jazz and classical music of the kind that begs to be performed in a church or a cathedral built with live music performances in mind should find this album to be quite the rewarding experience I gather”.
****** Progressor (N) Olav “Progmessor” Björnsen
“We are taken through many different moods, with the choir, percussion, trumpet, and big band taking on various roles and conversing. It’s a grand piece of big band music that, in many ways, borders on classical music.”
Jazz Nyt (DK) Niels Overgård
“The music was first inspired by the small human – the innocent, angelic voices of the choir, and the great Mother Nature – represented by the primal force of Mazur. It was composed with the Nordic nature «just there» with all its might, colors and sounds and countless relationships to man, in the places where Buchanan liver – in a landscape of soil and fields on Mols, just outside Aarhus, shaped by all the small hills and in the middle of the strong winds from the sea and in a small farmhouse in Kornhult, Sweden, surrounded by the darkness of the pine forest, the moss and the bird life. The references to the nature elements are reflected in the lyrics: «When I end, I will end as a tree ends: as a fire, bleeding out the sunlight from every summer it lived» (from the fourth movement «The Stones Make Sand Slow»). The cover artwork, the oil painting Variations of the Wind by Lars Physant on a relief structure created by Sílvia Magriñá Costán complements the musical vision.
As in previous orchestral works of Buchanan, he weaved masterfully a unique and dramatic musical encounter, contemplative and intensely emotional that lingers long in the mind after it is gone. Song & Wind is a seven-movement choral suite. Buchanan plays the flugelhorn and he is one of the main soloists and the Copenhagen Boys Choir gives voice to his elegiac, melancholic melodies. The Aarhus Jazz Orchestra embraces and complements these beautiful melodies with warm brass (four flugelhorn players and four trombonists) and woodwind (five sax players and clarinetists and flutists) sounds. Mazur acts as a sonic sorceress and a catalyst who connects the choir voices with the jazz orchestra and colors and paints the suite with delicate, imaginative sounds.”
Salt Peanuts (N) Eyal Hareuveni