This set of original compositions, featuring drummer Dylan van der Schyff and trumpet player Brad Turner, displays cellist-composer Peggy Lee’s inventiveness, lyricism, and emotional depth.
– Mark Werlin, NativeDSD & All About Jazz

Peggy Lee, the Vancouver-based cellist whose playing shines in many contexts, from classical and contemporary classical to creative jazz and improv, is also an extraordinary composer and bandleader. She is known especially for her octets, The Peggy Lee Band (1998- ) and Film in Music (2009- ), as well as Waxwing (2007- ), the trio she co-leads with Jon Bentley and west coast guitarist Tony Wilson. This new suite for ten players was commissioned by Coastal Jazz and Blues and premiered at the 2016 Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

The idea, says Lee, was “to bring together some of my longstanding band members with some of the younger players that I had recently begun to collaborate with. I wasn’t thinking about specific instruments really, just the players that I was excited about working with, but there are echoes of much of the music that has been meaningful to me over the years.” (She cites Carla Bley and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra as inspirations.) With many colors to draw upon, the music is multi-layered and texturally varied, featuring driving rhythmic vamps, incendiary improvisation and sometimes achingly beautiful melodic compositions.

The writing was mostly intuitive: “I worked out a loose plan designating areas for solos etc. But specific arrangements came together once we started playing, and the direction that the solos took was completely up to the musicians. This band certainly has a lot in common with the sound of the Peggy Lee Band with the horns (Jon Bentley and Brad Turner are in both ensembles), but adding violin and pedal steel creates another dimension.”

Lee sees the distinctions between jazz and classical in her performing and writing as fluid, and that it’s all related to the music she makes with improvisers. “If the music moves me, whether it’s a great melody by Puccini or Ennio Morricone or a cool texture notated by Nicole Lizée or a Brad Turner solo, it’s all music and I don’t care what you call it.”

As for the coda, The Band’s “The Unfaithful Servant”, “that’s just a song that I’ve loved for a long time and always thought it would be a great vehicle for soloing of the right kind. We started by doing it as an instrumental but when it was time to record, I thought it would sound great with Robin Holcomb and luckily she was game.”

Peggy Lee, cello
Brad Turner, trumpet & flugelhorn
Jon Bentley, soprano & tenor saxophone
John Paton, tenor saxophone
Roderick Murray, trombone
Meredith Bates, violin
Cole Schmidt, electric & acoustic guitar
Bradshaw Pack, pedal steel guitar
James Meger, electric & acoustic bass
Dylan van der Schyff, drums, percussion & Yamaha RX-15 drum machine
Robin Holcomb, voice (track 13)