Belgium's 15-piece
Flat Earth Society are one of the hottest big bands on the planet, but are they a jazz big band? On the evidence of 2009's
Cheer Me, Perverts!, the answer would be generally no and generally yes, in that order. The album's first track, "Vole Sperm Reverie," might be as jazzy as
Frank Zappa ever got, appropriate for a piece seemingly designed to display the sensibilities and advanced electric guitar-istics of
Zappaholic Pierre Vervloesem, whose scrambled name provides the anagram song title, just as bandleader/clarinetist's
Peter Vermeersch's name is scrambled to form the title of the CD itself. But
Zappa wasn't really jazz for purists even when at his jazziest -- say,
The Grand Wazoo -- and "Vole Sperm Reverie" isn't either, with its swingin'/slammin' jazz-rock rhythms,
Vervloesem exercising his chops, and the prominent organ voicings of
Peter Vandenberghe substituting for
George Duke's keyboards. Until a full-ensemble bridge late in the tune, the band's reeds and horns are largely there for riffing embellishment and punctuation; this is about the closest
FES have come to their '90s avant jazz-rock antecedent,
X-Legged Sally, a
Vermeersch-led group about half the size of
FES and also featuring
Vervloesem,
Vandenberghe, and two other
Flat Earthers, trumpeter
Bart Maris and saxophonist
Michel Mast. The next track, "Rearm, Get That Char!," is truly classic
FES, so staccato and punchy that the hornmen probably had to apply ice packs to the lower portions of their faces after playing it. The multi-sectioned piece features skewed rhythms like the title track of the group's previous Crammed CD,
Psychoscout -- as if
FES are from a planet where dancing is mandatory but straight dance rhythms are utterly forbidden. There's an electric
Miles-ish trumpet solo early on, and later in this monster
Vermeersch takes a clarinet solo but seems a bit quiet in the overall mix -- and yet the backing arrangement is so clipped and tight that you hear his every nuance. Amidst this track's many layers, even the thwack of a single percussion instrument has dead air around it.