Tippett, Keith - Frames: Music For An Imaginary Film 2 x CDs
SKU
OGUN 010-011
Other than the very famous Centipede, this is the largest ensemble that Keith has ever led, with 22 musicians involved. The sound is very full & lyrical, & does bear resemblence to a smaller version of Centipede. Tippett (piano, harmonium), Stan Tracey (piano), Marc Charig (trumpets, tenorhorn, Kenyan thumb piano), Henry Lowther (trumpet), Dave Amis, Nick Evans (trombones), Elton Dean, Trevor Watts (alto & soprano saxes), Brian Smith, Larry Stabbins (tenor & soprano saxes, flutes – in the case of Smith, alto flute), Phil Wachsmann (violin, electronics), Steve Levine, Rod Skeaping, Geoffrey Wharton (violins), Tim Kramer, Alexandra Robinson (cellos), Harry Miller (bass), Peter Kowald (bass, tuba), Louis Moholo (drums), Frank Perry (percussion), Julie Tippetts (vocals, lyrics), Maggie Nicols (vocals). "Thankfully this is available on CD, remastered by Steve Beresford from Hugh Hopper’s original production. And it’s Tippett’s greatest artistic statement. His previous big band experiments with Centipede have been consolidated, and here he scales down the band from 55 to 22 musicians without any loss of power and considerably more concentration – here there aren’t three thrashing drummers cancelling each other out, for example, and the instrumental pairings (hence the name Ark) are inspired, for example Miller’s bass with Kowald’s tuba, and the sacred (Perry’s proto-New Age percussion) with the holy profane (Moholo’s drums). As with Centipede, it brings together all of the regular groupings with which Tippett was then working, at the core of which is Ovary Lodge – everything radiates out from the central quartet... It numbed me and stunned me to the core when I first heard it at teatime on Charles Fox’s Jazz Today programme on Radio 3 in the late autumn of 1978; when I got hold of a copy of the record, with its brilliant Dick Whitbread collage of unforeseen tentacles swallowing up a panoramic view of North London – the natural reclaiming the manmade – on its cover, I thought it was the greatest record I had ever heard. Sometimes when listening to it, and many of the other masterpieces released on Ogun, I still do."-The Naked Maja
- LabelOgun
- UPC5020675570825