Blue Note Records
2003
Renee Rosnes And The Danish Big Band
About This Album
The greatest revelation in Canadian jazz pianist Renee Rosnes' With the Danish Radio Big Band album isn't that she fronts the stellar band as a soloist, but that she is featured as a composer and arranger. These aspects reveal other dimensions to her already storied reputation as a top-notch pianist and improviser. Over the course of eight tracks, five of which were composed by Rosnes, the pianist's hard bop style extends its reach to take in elements of modalism, the complex chromatic atmospheres of Stan Kenton's experimental period, tough Thad Jones/Mel Lewis-style charts, and the incorporation of dissonance and rugged harmonic architectures into her aggressive style. In many ways, this is Rosnes at both her most intense and laid-back. Intensity is not always the level of her playing but is always the level of her focus, and she strives to bring out not only the tonal palette -- which is rich but subtle -- in her compositions but to guarantee the maximum reach of her compositional ambition. Soloists come and go but always toward the margin where she waits, comping, filling in spaces, and finally letting herself loose with large chord voices and mid-register runs that reveal her dexterity with virtually any big-band structure.
Track List (try tracks 2,4,7 and 8)

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