Neil Ardley/New Jazz Orchestra - On the Radio: BBC Sessions 1971 review

The Guardian 80

(Dusk Fire)

The polymath British composer and bandleader Neil Ardley foresaw much of today’s genre-bending, often via his leadership of the south London rehearsal band that became the New Jazz Orchestra in the mid-60s. These two 1971 BBC radio sessions join music from Ardley, Mike Gibbs, the shortlived piano visionary Mike Taylor, Barbara Thompson and Cream’s Jack Bruce, with Ardley’s and electronicist Keith Winter’s chamber-jazzy experimental suite, The Time Flowers.

Gibbs’s Tanglewood ’63 combines the NJO’s subtlety and rock-savvy rhythm section with characterful improv from trumpeter Harry Beckett and the bluesy saxist Dick Heckstall-Smith. A standout segue of Taylor’s pensive and harmonically audacious Half Blue and Pendulum is warmed by Ian Carr’s glowing flugelhorn sound. The Time Flowers joins glimpses of Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s Sketches of Spain with soft classical strings, electronic chimes and empathic dialogue between Carr and the Coltrane-esque saxophonist Don Rendell, in textural collages that only occasionally have a treading-water feel. Progressive music from almost half a century back, it sounds remarkably fresh.