Recorded live at the Zurich Jazz Festival in 1980, this was America's first taste of the wild abandon that is
the Vienna Art Orchestra and expatriate Lauren Newton's glorious vocal instrument. This is a 13-piece big band led by the beautifully weird compositional, instructional, and arranging craziness of Mathias Rüegg. They trash and revere all traditions -- both historical and avant-garde at the same time -- while using them both along with carnival and circus music, classical forms and fugues, and French salon music. They swing here like a
Mingus big band playing "Jelly Roll, But Mingus Rolls Better," with soloists who could care less what the ensemble chart says and vice versa. Newton, mixed high above the prattle, soars with the intensity of a pianist while blowing
Jon Hendricks away at his own game. The fun really begins when the ensemble changes tempos two or three times and sections play against each other as in "Concerto Piccolo," even if begun by the lilting line of the title's instrument. Musical puns and variations on serious themes abound from the orchestra pit, but unlike Rüegg's Euro counterparts like
Franz Koglmann and
Stan Tracey, this man has a sense of where colorization and parody end and a new musical language is created. In this sense he resembles both
Frank Zappa and
Willem Breuker, but uses tradition differently -- not as a guidepost but as a landmark on the way to someplace else (and Rüegg knows exactly where he's going, judging by his charts). The man's imagination is the limit because his band can do virtually anything he dares to dream up. And while it's true that the saxophone (and reed) section of
Harry Sokal,
Roman Schwaller, and Uli Scherer is top-notch, virtually unsurpassed by any like section in European music, it is Ms. Newton's performance that steals the night. She cuts loose with an abandon that vocalists rarely use these days. Unafraid to screw up the text, when she picks up steam she is literally unstoppable -- even by the band! There are colors, harmonies, and polyphonal systems at work here that will be recalled as the glory years of Euro big-band jazz in the future, and the evocative timbral nature of Rüegg's compositions will be studied for decades to come. Truly,
Concerto Piccolo is an amazing debut from a band that offers more than it could possibly receive. ~ Thom Jurek