Music / Previews
Jaga Jazzist at The Lantern
What with everyone being so excited about Snarky Puppy these days it’s worth remembering that the mighty Jaga Jazzist have been packing out stages and being all ‘nu-jazz’ for over a decade now.
It was in 2002 that the many-headed Norwegian ubergroup released The Living Room Hush, a bewilderingly eclectic album of closely orchestrated electronica and ambient jazz that set the bar for the genre soon to be known as cinematic.
Prizes abounded, deservedly, including the BBC’s Jazz Album of the Year reflecting the pan-European appeal they had stimulated, and it was only a matter of time before those arbiters of cool at Ninja Tunes took the band into their fold.
is needed now More than ever
Two excellent albums followed – What We Must (2007) and One-Armed Bandit (2010) – each adding depth and polish to the complex strangeness of the Jaga Jazzist sound and eventually (inevitably) eliciting the P-Word from delightedly baffled reviewers.
But if the band minded being called prog it’s never showed and, if anything, the two Horntveth brothers, who write most of the music, seem to have gleefully headed down that path towards that Holy Grail of proggery – the live album with an orchestra.
But where such projects floundered for their 70s predecessors Live With Britten Sinfonia (2013) was a triumphant step forward in the Jaga Jazzist story, marshalling the possibilities of a 35-strong line-up with impressive vigour and freshness.
It’s all as carefully composed as anything you’d hear at The Proms, yet always with an undercurrent of surprise that could take it to a late night dance floor with a mere tweak of the bass levels. It grooves, in other words, but it does it intelligently.
Sadly they can’t bring the Sinfonia on tour with them this time, but that intelligence and the groove will certainly be there aplenty.
November 30
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