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Rating: Approaching John Zorn's projects, you can never be sure of the outcome. The New York saxophonist, who in this album appears only as a "guest" on one of the tracks, reaffirms his role as a composer by providing a remarkable collective with the musical material he has developed.
And the collective is indeed one of the most attractive aspects of the album: it is, in fact, the most classic jazz formation (for the quintet with rhythm section and two horns, see, for example, Miles Davis) consisting in this case of five giants of American jazz, namely Dave Douglas on trumpet, Joe Lovano on tenor sax, Uri Caine on piano, Greg Cohen on double bass, and Joey Baron on drums. Zorn's operation in this work is precisely to push such a canonical ensemble to its limits by testing it on compositions that have "other" references.
Although the instrumental and expressive level of the musicians is extremely high, and the solo episodes are, in some cases, of evident quality, the album has something that doesn't convince. The mix of elements it contains (primarily the various roots the compositions draw upon) might suggest innovative results that ultimately, however, do not materialize. The formula of the tracks, almost always based on the theme/solos/theme structure, appears rather repetitive, and the outcome always remains vaguely self-referential. This is even more disconcerting when we compare the present result with the bold contemporary jazz productions that the individual musicians involved have been working on for years.
Subjected to the hardest test for a jazz album, namely listening as background music for a "generalist" audience, it encounters general indifference, a result that I leave to the readers to evaluate.
There’s no doubt that the album deserves a good number of listens, especially for the rare occasion to see such a high-level collective united, but don't expect it to reach the peaks of your playlists.
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