JAZZ/ Mark Miller

6-~-JiN/.1L- GC:T' c:)..~ \ CfQ
musicians supply- in particular
to the energy of reedmen Perry
White, Pat Caird and Ross
Taggart and trumpeters Bill Clark
Unity 114
and Walter White. A word, too,
It's a good year when you get
for Blaine Dunaway, the
three big-band albums out of
Canadian Ray Nance, whose
Canada; it's a good decade when
doubling of trumpet and violin
you get three out of one Canadian seems tailor-made for Fraser's
band. VEJI Now! is VEJI's third,
expanding range of interests.
joining two other recent releases,
ALIVE IN SEATTLE .
Dave McMurdo Jazz Orchestra
Lunar
Adventures
and Vic Vogel's Le Big Band, in
-Nine Winds NWCD 0132
the country's record bins. Hugh
The Vancouver quartet Lunar
Fraser shares with McMurdo the
Adventures describes its music in
orchestral ambitions that the
terms of "Electro-Acoustic Tribal
presence of 18 other musicians
Sounds in the tradition of the
invariably inspire, and with Vogel
a love for the pure excitement that Twenty-First Century" and
19 musicians can generate. As
performs it in a wild, dervish-like
evidence of the former, VEJI
manner that probably comes of
Now! has as its centrepiece
trying to play off all of those
Fraser's 28-minute Mass in C
esthetic and historical opposites
minor for Jazz Orchestra, in which against each other. There are a
he handles a classical form with
few moments of quiet, but these
confidence, sensitivity and
inevitably prove to be a matter of
burgeoning power - his Sanctus
the catching of breath and the reis right out of McCoy Tyner's
establishment of bearings. The
Song for the New World.
four musicians - tenorman Coat
VEJI Now! also serves Fraser as
Cooke, guitarist Ron Samworth,
a retrospective. His frenetic
bassist Clyde Reed and drummer
Freeabin Suite - the title is a play
Gregg
Simpson - whirl
on the Russian composer
remarkably
well together as an
Alexander Scriabin - was first
ensemble.
Samworth's
guitar
recorded in part in 1981. Here, rerecorded in its entirety, it captures occasionally gives the band the
hip sound of the late 1980s, and
the headlong enthusiasm that
the compositions of Cooke and
Fraser originally brought to the
Simpson are clear and catchy, but
big-band business. It is clearly a
more settled, paced composer who no one musician, nor any single
element, stands out in what is by
is in charge of the Mass, now
and large a group creation and,
giving shape, as well as the free
by and large, a group success.
rein of old, to the energy his

VEJINOW!
Hugh Fraser
& The Vancouver Ensemble
of Jazz Improvisation