Neil Ardley Group - BBC Sessions New Jazz Orchestra 1968-1970

This is an archival album, which presents recordings by two Orchestral Jazz ensembles, both led by the brilliant pianist / composer / arranger / bandleader Neil Ardley. The album presents fourteen tracks, six by the New Jazz Orchestra (a.k.a. NJO), recorded in 1968 and eight by the Neil Ardley Group, recorded in 1970. Five of the NJO tracks appear in a studio version on their 2nd studio album “Le Dejeuner Sur L`herbe”. The first seven of the Neil Ardley Group tracks, which were composed by pianist / composer Mike Taylor and are a song cycle / Jazz & Poetry suite, were sadly never recorded in the studio and released on an album. Taylor tragically died just a few months before this music was recorded.

The lineup of these two ensembles reads like a Who’s Who of the British Jazz at the end of the 1960s, some still very young at the time, but already experienced musicians, who were going to shape the British Jazz scene in the decades to come. The NJO lineup includes Ardley as the leader / conductor, trumpeters Derek Watkins, Henry Lowther and Ian Carr, saxophonists Dave Gelly, Jim Philip, Dick Heckstall-Smith and Barbara Thompson, trombonists Chris Pyne, Robin Gardner and Michael Gibbs, tuba player George Smith, vibraphonist Frank Ricotti, bassist Tony Reeves and drummer Jon Hiseman. The Neil Ardley Group lineup includes Ardley on piano, vocalist Norma Winstone, Carr, Gelly, Thompson, Ricotti, bassist Chris Laurence and drummer Mike Travis. I rest my case…

The music, as expected, is absolutely sensational and reflects the vibrancy and ingenuity of the British Jazz scene at this pivotal period, when the modern British Jazz idiom was molded for decades to come. The specific idiosyncrasies and “Britishness” of the new epoch is simply encapsulated in every note played here. It is also a superb display of the individual talents of these magnificent musicians, those who are still with us and sadly those who departed, like Thompson and Hiseman, who met as members of the NJO and created one of the British Jazz “power couples” or Ardley and Carr, whose giant talents are deeply missed.

Overall, this is an absolute must have album for every British Jazz collector, especially in view of the fact that some of the music captured herein is not available anywhere else. For the cognoscenti, the album offers endless hints and interconnections, like a sensational version of the song “Jumping Off The Sun”, which became an anthem for the legendary Colosseum, which was founded by Hiseman and Heckstall-Smith, and included Reeves and Thompson, and so on… Adam Baruch