Jazz
The Captain Black Big Band delivers a stylish and energetic album that’s full of invention
Orrin Evans and the Captain Black Big Band
Presence
Orrin Evans (piano), Caleb Curtis (alto sax), John Raymond (trumpet), et al
Smoke Sessions SSR-1805
Who’d run a big band? It has demands all the way down, whether in terms of repertoire, personnel, financial viability or, indeed, the thankless task of trying to capture such a unit on record. Step forward
Orrin Evans, the excellent pianist whose name should be ringing more than a few ship’s bells in his current capacity as pianist for the laterally-thinking trio The Bad Plus. Graham Collier once remarked that there are two kinds of big bands: the predictable and the unpredictable, citing Duke Ellington’s as the epitome of the latter; this is also where the Captain Black Big Band (named after the brand of pipe tobacco favoured by the leader’s father) belongs, sitting exactly halfway between Ellingtonian mellifluousness and the spiky puckishness of the Sun Ra Arkestra. The band’s third outing on CD features a set almost entirely written by band members and is crammed with energetic yet elegant arrangements, inventive melodies, rhythmic drive and bonkers solos and cadenzas in both likely and unlikely places, all corralled on a cleanly balanced recording that nonetheless captures all the atmosphere of its live origins. ★★★★★