Cinematic Coltrane

WoNoBloG is happy to announce a new contributor to the blog. You will find that his contributions make the postings more divers. Welcome, OMK!

The Cinematic Orchestra is a band that I started to appreciate over the last few years. They appear on the Ninja Tunes label, a label that features a number of cool bands that are in the cross-over between jazz, lounge and dance. That label has quite a few bands that I appreciate. I do not know much about the background of the Cinematic orchestra, except that what is written on Wikipedia. The dedicated lemma describes their style as:

"The Cinematic Orchestra's sound, in both live and studio contexts, employs a live band which improvises along with a turntablist and electronic elements such as samples provided by Swinscoe. In their studio releases Swinscoe will often remix the live source material to produce a combination of live jazz improvisation with electronica, such that it is difficult to tell where the improvisation ends and the production begins."

And produced it is, their music. It's very slick but I find that they are still on the safe side of overproducing and have not lost the guts that are so essential to good music.

One of my most favorite tunes is the recording of "Man with a Movie Camera" [1] from the album with the same title. The tune starts with a soprano sax solo accompanied by a quarter beat drum-and-base rythm, the congas enter and around 2 minutes into the song the turntables are spun. That is where the synth kick in and the rythm changes, it sound weirdly syncopated while in fact the beat has changed to something that I still haven't maneged to figure out completely (3:4 followed by 4:4th?), then the composition turns back to the sax solo accompanied with warm melodic chords.

For some reason I associated towards Man with a Movie Camera when I got blown away by John Coltrane's India on volume 1 of the Village Vanguard compilations.[2]

I have listened to Coltrane so now and then but I find his music difficult to approach. His compositions are deep and complex. That said, I am starting to appreciate that if you take your time there is a beautiful rock-and-roll type rawness that combines with melodic melody lines. Coltrane is worth an investment and I am prety sure that Swinscoe invested and drew inspiration. Fortunatelly there is a big Coltrane legacy to invest in.

OMK