Album review: Steve Lehman and Orchestre National de Jazz - 2023 - Ex Machina

This is a really fascinating album: Steve Lehman is well-known in jazz circles for being a composer that uses spectral techniques in his music. I've admired his albums that he made in collaboration with S​é​l​é​b​é​yone, but I confess that I haven't particularly loved his solo albums as a bandleader. Until now. This is something really new: I listened to it on speakers, and I'm writing the review with a track in my headphones. The fullness of the timbres with a proper jazz orchestra blows away the combo albums that are all the rage these days. I plan to steal some of these ideas for my musical. - That's an important note: you can listen to whatever music you like while composing... what Sondheim meant in his tape to me was that he couldn't look at material that's actually sent to him. There were a number of prominent lawsuits in the Tin Pan Alley days that set a precedent. Someone would send a songwriter a song, then sue them if they wrote something that was even remotely similar. - It's quite strange to hear a groove mixed with all those funky chords. I realise that I do that in my own orchestrations, but I'm like Tchaikovsky: I hear it in my inner ear, and that's how I orchestrate, rather than looking at harmonic series charts or dry theory. I've got a good memory for the ranges of the instruments, which is good because Sibelius is fucking useless with that: like, every single instrument is missing notes at the extremes of their ranges in Sibelius -- it's like spell-check for composers! 😠 - The abstractness of this music really appeals to me. I hear a strong sampling influence in this, which isn't so obvious in Lehman's earlier work (Pure Imagination). Emotionally, it's very much that dialed-back cool of contemporary jazz, but I do think that the use of WAM microtonal techniques does widen the emotional world of this music. Regarding his saxophone playing, I like that he's quite a tuneful improviser and contained rather than explosive. My father hated drum solos, and I reckon sax solos can get real tedious. - This is music that's influenced by academic discourse, but it's still written for a different audience, which is the dwindling number of jazz fans. Despite the overall standard of musicianship dropping in the general population in WEIRD populations, the general standard of musicianship among musicians is much higher than it was a generation or two ago. Now, lots of people have some legit training and some jazz and some pop and some from various traditional styles... resulting in albums like this. Pi Recordings puts out a lot of stuff in a similar vein.