Opener ‘My Centennial’ is warm and positive. But first go back and listen to Thad Jones himself in action.
And the trumpeter’s ‘Mornin’ Reverend’ goes to the heart of the matter as you can discover by dipping into All My Yesterdays.
Japanese, New York, composer, arranger, and conductor Miho Hazama wraps her ‘Live Life This Day’ suite within Thad Jones classics in what is an appealing suitably maximalist collaboration with the Danish Radio Big Band and Symphony that fizzes with energy.
Known for her own band m_unit through which her best work is contained Hazama has already collaborated with such luminaries as Joshua Redman and Lionel Loueke.
With the Danish Radio Big Band, one of Europe’s top big bands, the Jones material is in safe hands for feel and execution. The extra polish is added courtesy of the strings of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.
Classic pieces radiate with exuberance progressively accented.
Hazama for years a chief conductor of the big band – an organisation Jones who died in 1986 himself conducted – the Japanese jazzer has also conducted the Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands and Europe’s top big band the WDR in Germany.
She arranges most of the Jones associated material. But the ‘A Child is Born’ arrangement is by Scott Ninmer.
Featured soloists include Karl-Martin Almqvist, Nicolai Schultz and Søren Frost.
The Hazama suite fits in well and contributes to the mood and pervasive feeling.
It’s not a definitive reading of Jones’ work by any means, however – one looks searching for that to the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra in recent times.
Or go back to what Jones himself did with the Danish Radio Big Band on a live at the Montmartre recording made in Copenhagen in 1978.
But Live Life This Day: Celebrating Thad Jones certainly is worth your time and revives interest in Jones, a trend that recurs cyclically as it justifiably should given the huge contribution Jones’ work amassed for the benefit of the endangered species of big band jazz globally.
More from marlbank – read a review of Danish bassist Chris Minh Doky’s New Beginnings which is our album of the week
