with Steve Lodev (keyboards), Steve Waterman & Martin Shaw (tpts,), Mark Nightingale & Barnaby Dickinson (tmbs)
Ben Crosland, acoustic and electric bass player, is based in Yorkshire and assembled this premier-league brass section to realise a commission from the 2011 Marsden Jazz Festival, inspired by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, An Open Place. The compositions are inspired by specific pieces, such as Henry Moore’s Reclining Figures, and Barbara Hepworth’s Family of Man, the whole composition is suffused with the gentle, pastoral quality of the Park. A project like this would be easy meat for a classical brass group, but here the fascination is how some of the most technically-brilliant brassmen of the jazz world preserve the excitement of jazz, spontaneity and creativity without ‘raising the roof’, which in other circumstances they could easily do.
See event website.