The Jazz Composer's Orchestra (JCOA)

This is a beautiful record, with a shiny mirrored gatefold cover and huge booklet, adorned with copious liner notes, photographs, poetry and and the actual scores. For an orchestra of composers, the JCOA records tended to stick to one composer per release, and this time it's Michael Mantler, who I think was the brains behind the whole project. And fair enough - the apostrophe indicates that this is the orchestra of a single composer, as opposed to being called the Jazz Composers Orchestra or even Jazz Composers' Orchestra (so few bands are willing to risk the trailing apostrophe). However, Cecil Taylor gets top billing, a line of his own, perhaps being the 'star power' used to market this thing. He only appears on the second LP, and they aren't his compositions, but he's clearly the featured guest as the booklet includes two pages of his Cecil Taylorisms, actually a beautiful verbal rendering of the complexity of group dynamics. I generally like Michael Mantler's work; I think he's underrated and definitely comes from a direction that tried to emphasise the power of the composer in new jazz music, particularly from a unioned/organised side, not unlike the AACM in a way. The sheer fact that this many musicians are together in a studio and the recording is clear and well-defined is an accomplishment alone; I actually really like listening to the first cut on headphones, as it has this throbbing low-end pulse underneath which can really work as 'night music'; a few months back I put the headphone extension cable on and sat on my balcony watching the trees sway in the summer wind while listening. Today's too cold for a repeat performance but in the glossy wooden echo of my bedroom (accented by the Ikea laminate floor) it takes on a different quality, maybe as the brass and saxes bounce around more. But that throb is so good - it's present not just on the aforementioned 'Communications #8' but on the short 'Preview' at the end of side two - and it helps to distinguish this from European free-jazz big bands like Globe Unity, who were generally more jittery and even light, in a sense. Larry Coryell is the featured soloist on 'Communications #9' and it gets into some real hot swamp jazz; his electric guitar rips holes over everything else, and when the same band reassembles for 'Communications #10' with Roswell Rudd it loses something without Coryell. Maybe I just like the way the guitar sound pulls everything closer to good fusion, or to Mantler's later work in the 70s. It's hard to single out any one musician here, as everyone eventually gets their moment, and it's not easy for me to determine which of the two flugelhorns is Lloyd Michels and which is Stephen Furtado, for example. The pace across both LPs is mostly 'full and fast', though not the death jazz speed of something like Naked City; just rumbling over the drums (either Andrew Cyrille or Beaver Harris) and the five simultaneous bassists (not always the same five, mind you). When Mr. Taylor enters the picture on LP #2, for the creatively titled 'Communications #11' he is mixed high enough to stay a constant presence throughout and he works well with this large of a group. This is 1968 so before Taylor's Unit band with Jimmy Lyons was established, but there's a similar sense of dynamics to his rising and falling runs. I can't really make much out of the scores because they are reproduced too small to really see, but the writing hits a high level of drama, especially on the second half (side four). The swells are particularly cinematic at points, and Taylor goes with the flow, locking in with Cyrille in particular (which makes sense, since the piano is of course a percussion instrument, something I am always aware of when listening to Cecil Taylor). The piano is mixed high, as high above everyone else as the cover's billing would suggest, and at times the other musicians fade into a background blur - yes, even Gato Barbieri. It's music that evokes a great sense of togetherness, sure, with a serious purpose and intent that paradoxically feels somewhat restrictive, as if it's interrogating the very question of what freedom is. And that's not always an easy listen, not because it's dissonant or dense but because it feels relentless in such a narratively understandable language. I go back to cinema because I honestly think that JCOA could have scored a film nicely (or maybe they did, I don't know); there's almost an emotional manipulation from the rising and crashing and plundering of these musicians. Whatever Mantler's intent was, I find it pretty affecting, even almost 50 years later.