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Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Recent Listening: Kathrine Windfeld Big Band

January 12, 2018 by Doug Ramsey

Kathrine Windfeld Big Band, Latency (Stunt Records)

Kathrine Winfeld’s second album further establishes the 30-year-old Dane in the vanguard of new arranger-composers and bandleaders. Her young, experienced, adventurous musicians from Denmark, Sweden and Norway may be considered an all-star Scandinavian aggregation, but not in the sense that Ms. Winfeld’s music dwells on Scandinavian themes. Rather, her work is in a league with bands like those of Maria Schneider, Darcy James Argue, Christian McBride and John Beasley’s Monkestra—outfits unafraid to be eclectic and eccentric but insistent on values growing out of the mainstream tradition. Ms. Winfeld’s crew maintains swing even when the saxophones in the piece called “Double Fleisch” verge on free jazz a la Chicago’s AACM of the 1960s. Then she unleashes the intrepid trombone soloist Göran Abelli, who is  unrestrained, as he was in the 2016 Windfeld album Aircraft.

Ms. Winfeld expresses a softer side of her conception in “Leaving Portland.” The piece opens with her subdued piano. The brass builds intensity before making way for a brief, lyrical, flugelhorn solo by the young Norwegian Magnus Oseth. The composer told me when we spoke in Sweden a couple of years ago that she has never been to Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. In a recent email interview about the piece, she explained,

“I just liked the sound of the words! The drama and melancholy of “port,” “land” and “leaving.”

Her orchestration beautifully captures both elements, which also underlie “Roadmovie,” with a Windfeld piano introduction supported by the Swedish bassist Johannes Vaht, who solos later in the piece, as does the Danish soprano saxophonist Jakob Lundbak, with his splendid reedy tone. The trombones introduce “Wasp,” but the wasp-in-chief is the Swedish tenor saxophonist Ida Karlsson, whose buzzing, slap-tongue notes and agitated delivery highlight the piece before it subsides beneath a passage orchestrated for reeds, brass and rhythm section.

“December Elegy” brings back Oseth on flugelhorn and Ms. Windfeld at the piano. More of the leader’s smooth orchestral textures encompass imaginative harmonies across the sections.

Occasionally, there are albums that give you more with each hearing. This is one of them.

From last summer’s Copenhagen Jazz Festival, here is the Windfeld Big Band with a live version of “Wasp.” At the top, go to your piano and strike A above middle C to find if they are in tune…or if your piano is in tune. The band members are listed at the end of the video.

For a Rifftides review of Aircraft, go here. For a review of the Windfeld band at the Ystad Jazz Festival in 2016, go here.

Have a good weekend.

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Comments

  1. Andreas Koenig says

    January 13, 2018 at 2:09 am

    Thanks for pointing her out.

    There is another outstanding young woman at the cutting edge of big band music: Monika Roscher, 33-year-old guitarist, singer, arranger from Germany who integrates the musical experience of her generation into arranging. Her latest achievement is the composing and arranging of the music for the theater production to Büchner’s Woyzeck at the Theatre of Basel, Switzerland. I saw her and her Big Band last year at the renowned Jazz Baltica Festival. Moving music, great performance, a few memories of Sun Ra even

    You may enjoy this video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKKKWtsoi9g

  2. Svetlana says

    January 13, 2018 at 3:25 am

    Your description is so ‘tasty’ and the public and musicians are so nice to watch that I would like to be there, alas!

    • Andreas Koenig says

      January 13, 2018 at 2:09 pm

      Thanks, Svetlana!

      Fortunately, we have YouTube these days with a wealth of great performances to watch and to listen to. But you are somewhat right: The overwhelming joy of the young musicians and the leading presence of Monika Roscher can best be enjoyed in the athmosphere of a live concert.

  3. Jan Lundgren says

    January 13, 2018 at 5:17 pm

    I am happy to have had Kathrine as a student at the Malmö Academy of Music! She is extremely talented indeed.

  4. Rob D says

    January 16, 2018 at 2:30 pm

    Wow..that was great! Loved the performance of “Wasp” I think I had heard from someone (probably Doug since I get most of my buying recommendations from him and his avid and informed readership) about the Windfeld band but this is my first hearing. Have to hear more.

    Thank you to Mr. Koenig for his thoughts on Monika Roscher. So much talent out there to explore. If you have open ears, we are truly living in a golden age for jazz.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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