Album review: Jaga Jazzist “Live With Britten Sinfonia”

by Michael Ferlazzo

When a band such as Jaga Jazzist releases a live album, one is expected to expect the unexpected. Unlike most live albums, where a band lays out their formula and improvises over it throughout the performance, allowing each member to expand upon their parts, Jaga Jazzist’s live album formulates a new dimension within their already multi-versed compositions.

Rather than hit the studio to create new music after the release of their 2010 album, One-Armed Bandit, Jaga Jazzist decided to recruit the celebrated British classical chamber orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, and further explore their previous works through a live performance composition.

If there is criticism at all of Jaga Jazzist, the impossible-to-properly-articulate-through-adjectives progressive-rock-jazz ensemble, it is that at times it might feel as though they have overshot their aim with their effort and do not reach the potential of particular arrangements. Their compositions are so broad and expansive that they are not able to properly explore each individual arrangement that is built, leaving them unfulfilled.  However, by bringing these pieces of work to the medium of a live performance rather than a studio album, they are truly able to build each individual fabric, by weaving the thread before your ears and then unraveling it in a fury, to simmer and grow.

In the music Jaga Jazzist creates, there is an experience that involves the slight idiocentric nuances of everyday life, from the sporadic brass and woodwinds that grace each song, to the looping toccatas throughout, to the propulsive grooves that flourish during their spirited crescendos, and the perpetual state of energy that exists in the stasis of their transitions.

The way they have deconstructed their previous works and then reconstructed them with new life, revels in the humanity, and carries that intangible charisma that all great music does, but with a sweepingly unpredictable nature, that is, well, natural. At certain times it feels like a Cirque du Soleil show that Rush might have composed, while at other junctures it has the feel of the lucid moment when your consciousness blurs the lines of reality and you are merrily daydreaming.

In One-Armed Bandit, the listener is allowed inside this journey with a vision of a universe constructed out of sound. On this new live album, we are side by side with the bandit, with full insight to his psyche, along for the adventure in a way that only the sublime can induce.

Purchase the album on iTunes