Far & Beyond Forward

Marshall Gilkes & WDR Big Band - Always Forward (2018) {Alternate Side Records ‎ASR 010}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/44.1kHz - Official Digital Download (bandcamp.com) -> 472 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 190 Mb | Cover | 5% repair rar
© 2018 Westdeutscher Rundfunk / Alternate Side Records | ‎ASR 010
Jazz / Modern Big Band / Progressive Jazz / Modern Arrangement / Trombone

Trombonist, composer and arranger Marshall Gilkes released his first album with the Cologne-based WDR Big Band in 2015. Three years later, he delivers Always Forward, a follow-up recording that celebrates the big band sound, pays respect to the arrangers that have shaped and influenced him, and shines a much-needed light on where big band music is headed.

Without any obvious keystone event, Biota – who started recording in the late 1970’s as the Mnemonist Orchestra – have quietly become a musical fixture, honoured for their uniquely, abstract, layered, polystylistic approach to musical construction - deaf to fashion or possible sales. And it seems, paradoxically, to have been just this art-orientated commercial indifference that has slowly won them loyal followers and surprisingly respectable sales. Now, for a wider audience - and at a congenial price - this box collects five representative releases that span their discography and track the radical evolution of their crystalline aesthetic – with added documentation, a band history, insights into their work process, and a full-length bonus CD embroidered from their archive of rare and unreleased material. Contents: Funnel to a Thread, Half a True Day, Invisible Map, Object Holder and Gyromancy (recorded as the Mnemonist Orchestra), and the box-only bonus Counterbalance.

This new release delves deep into the unique melting pot sound of reggae, funk and dub created throughout the 1970s at the Studio One music lab situated at 13 Brentford Road, Kingston, where the intense experiments and collaborations of crack musicians, singers, DJs and engineers under the guidance of producer Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd produced the most forward-thinking music ever to come out of Jamaica.