I much prefer this to while clearly noteworthy, Live Life This Day.
Sadly I haven’t so far witnessed composer/arranger Miho Hazama live. But luckily I have heard the Danish Radio Big Band a couple of times, once at the Barbican when they were accompanying Van Morrison and once at Ronnie’s when I hung out with a couple of the cats in the old downstairs bar where artists and punters could commune together. I seem to recall a conversation about reeds. Both times were in the 1990s.
So an update. Firstly the DRBB is clearly going through a strong period artistically, a claim based on recordings only. That to my knowledge began in 2024 with the release of XL-LX particularly the “Roller Coaster” Bley-ian elements of that compendium of compositional inputs.
I think Frames is even better. It harnesses mellow voicing well. There’s storming trumpet and sax soloing in places and the tunes of Hazama’s are absorbing. I suppose there is a nod again to Thad Jones and Mel Lewis but there’s also a Gil Evans type thread it seems to me to be gleaned from Aura II. And “of course” without being too presumptive you think laterally of Palle Mikkelborg and resort to Aura – the great Dane’s work with Miles Davis.
Hazama, 39, also has led her own chamber orchestra m_unit – read a review of 2023’s Beyond Orbits. She trained in classical composition in Tokyo before moving to New York to study jazz under Jim McNeely. In 2019, she became the first female chief conductor of the Danish Radio Big Band. She also serves as a permanent guest conductor for the Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands and has been Grammy nominated for Dancer in Nowhere as well as Live Life This Day.
Do check out In the Middle of Nothing after listening to Aura. It makes sense the more you absorb the new sounds.
I liked the piano part played by Copenhagen based Pole Artur Tuźnik on ‘The First Notes’. Tuźnik is also on a much more old fashioned album called Monk & More that’s new this year. It’s a very rhythmic piece full of the sort of syncopated, complex, rhythms and pulsar shifts that separates the sheep from the goats. It’s super fine. What do you do when the album is over? Simple: play it again and again.
