To approximate the first half of
Fred Ho's album
Year of the Tiger, it's necessary to imagine the sound that might be created if the members of
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra were mixed with the players from
Parliament/
Funkadelic and set loose on the
Michael Jackson and
Jimi Hendrix catalogs. That's right, songs like "Thriller" and "Purple Haze" get severely retrofitted into an aggressive, irreverent jazz-funk style, with harsh, massed horn parts. Sometimes, the sound resembles a couple of high-school marching bands fighting it out on the same football field. In the second part of the album,
Ho takes a more conventional jazz approach, that is, if "conventional" can be taken to mean a post-bop big-band style in which a horn ensemble is employed for avant-garde purposes. And then there's the children's chorus that pipes up on the Oriental-styled "Hero Among Heroes." This is ambitious, challenging jazz, occasionally made somewhat more accessible by the leader's evident zany sense of humor. ~ William Ruhlmann