Stan Getz & The Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band - Changes of Scenes (1971) CD Rip

Tracklist

01 - Extravagances
02 - Symptones
03 - Quiproquos
04 - Escarmouches
05 - Touchstone
06 - Provocations

personnel :

Stan Getz - tenor saxophone
Francy Boland - piano, arranger
Kenny Clarke - drums
Benny Bailey, Art Farmer, Rick Kiefer, Manfred Schoof, Ack van Rooyen - trumpet, flugelhorn
Erik van Lier, Albert Mangelsdorff, Åke Persson - trombone
Herb Geller - alto saxophone, flute, oboe, English horn
Ronnie Scott - tenor saxophone
Stan Sulzmann - tenor saxophone, flute, soprano saxophone
Tony Coe - tenor saxophone, clarinet
Sahib Shihab - baritone saxophone, flute, soprano saxophone
Jean Warland - bass
Tony Inzalaco - percussion

That this rare album, now on CD as part of Verve's Elite Editions series, was originally released only in Europe testifies to the dominance of jazz-rock in 1971 and not to the staggering quantity of imagination that one hears on the session today. Still co-leading his legendary European unit (this was their last recording), Francy Boland unleashed his classical training to produce dazzling, fantastically complex writing often loaded with dissonances, unusual groupings of instruments, freeform freakouts, alternating sections in 5/4/ and 4/4, loose-jointed structures, and firestorm endings. Then they tried to record these difficult charts in a Cologne, Germany studio in one day! Yet Getz's great ear picks everything up intuitively; his solos, though brief in playing time, are loaded with sometimes strident emotion and occasionally flirt with the outside. The Clarke/Boland band itself is in dynamic, bold and brassy form, playing the hell out of these tough pieces (dig the Kenton-ian buildup near the close of "Provocations"). Within the band, Albert Mangelsdorff breathes fire on trombone, Herb Geller doubles -- or quintuples -- effectively on five instruments, including English horn, piccolo and oboe (along with tenor and alto), and Boland occasionally appears on ghostly organ and electric piano. Not only was this Getz's most adventurous session since Focus and the first few bossa nova records, it is very much out of character for Boland, who usually played it safer than this. Too bad this CD is destined to be a limited edition, for Getz's 1971 European adventure deserves to be circulated in more permanent form. ~ Richard S. Ginell