Echoes

Album review

On Echoes, its seventh album, Scandinavia's Fire! Orchestra utilize a supersized big band comprising 43 members. Fire! -- the paint-peeling jazz improv trio composed of saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Johan Berthling, and drummer Andreas Werliin -- was founded in 2009. They created a separate Fire! Orchestra in 2012 to further explore tonal, compositional, and arrangement frontiers under the overarching umbrella of orchestral interplay. The recorded Echoes has a run-time of just under 85 minutes, a far cry from its two-hour live premiere in 2022. Its core is comprised of seven self-titled parts, almost all over ten-minutes long. They are interspersed with shorter pieces that inform and illustrate the larger theme. This gradually unfolding work is a commingling of jazz-funk, rock, electronic, and contemporary new music under the twin umbrellas of scripted group interaction and collective improvisation.
In "Echoes: I See Your Eye, Pt. 1" melds modern jazz and contemporary classical music as restrained strings, bass, percussion, and a drum kit offer a trance-like trudge. A bluesy tenor sax and piano enter the frame, crawling along in deference to the ensemble before Gustafsson soothes the lyricism then splits the tune apart with his solo breaks. "Echoes: Forest Without Shadows" weds organic percussion to strings in a swirling fantasia of multivalent textures and dimensions before a trumpet and a saxophone lead them into taut improvisation. "Echoes: A Lost Farewell" opens disc two as a conversation between string players. After a couple of minutes, brass and reeds fold themselves in as the beat emerges from bongos, congas, and a kit. Horns start asserting an alternate harmony as the tempo increases and syncopates. Halfway through it erupts into free skronk only to return as vanguard, big-band swing. "Echoes: Nothing Astray. All Falling." is an extended, eerie meditation for the Brazilian berimbau, electronics, and strings. "Echoes: In Those Veins. A Silvernet." is an exercise in atmospheric percussion amid woodwind and electronic interplay. "Echoes: Cala Boca Menino" recalls early Chris Bowden and late David Axelrod simultaneously in its weave of paranoid reeds and brass, with funky beats, bumping basslines, and cop movie car chase dramatics. Closer "Echoes: I See Your Eye, Pt. 2" reprises the opener, but with tenor sax and lead vocals from Joe McPhee. He adds bluesy, rough-hewn soul to the lyric. His half-sung, half-shouted delivery lies deep inside the rhythm section's pocket, but is adorned by foreboding, restless, textured strings. During the final half, wailing tenor sax, mysterious piano, a hypnotic walking bassline, and an incantatory drum pattern frame McPhee's shouts, wails, and exclamations.
Echoes offers Fire! Orchestra's largest recorded lineup to date. They deliver a wildly dynamic, texturally complex, and dramatically balanced album with world-class musicianship. In addition to adventurous jazz fans, the creativity, vision, and humor here should interest -- and entertain -- a vast range of listeners.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo