The Callum Au Big Band - Something's Coming (2013)

We are very excited to announce the release of our debut album, “Something’s Coming”! This album was recorded at Angel Studios in late 2012, and fully features the 17 members of the big band, alongside a staggering complement of special guests: vocalists Emma Smith and Iain Mackenzie, flautist Gareth Lockrane, and saxophonists Peter Long and Nigel Hitchcock.
The centrepiece of the album is Callum’s new West Side Story Suite for Big Band – a continuous work in six movements based on some of the most famous melodies from Leonard Bernstein’s musical. The Suite was first performed in West Side Story’s 50th Anniversary year at the Cadogan Hall’s Out to Lunch festival. It reinvents the well-known and popular music from the show, with each movement giving a new big band twist to Bernstein’s melodies, from the shifting time signatures of “Something’s Coming” to the electric, Jaco-influenced “America”, and the pensive, gospel treatment of “Somewhere”.
In addition to the suite, the album features a set of new commissions specially written for the band: Callum Au’s ‘Gentleman Jack’; Freddie Gavita’s ‘Beloved’ and UK flute virtuoso and master composer/arranger Gareth Lockrane’s ‘Roots’. The album’s first track, Callum’s arrangement of the Harry Warren standard “September in the Rain”, is a very conscious tribute to the great American big bands of Count Basie, Nelson Riddle, and Thad Jones, some of the band’s greatest influences.