MIKE WESTBROOK — Metropolis (review)

MIKE WESTBROOK — Metropolis album cover Album · 1971 · Progressive Big Band Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
Of the few concept albums composer Mike Westbrook did in the height of the British-jazz’s golden age, Metropolis might just be his more essential work. Generally regarded as an Ellington student, many of his works presented a strong traditional big-band feel, even if Westbrook often forayed outside those boundaries with albums like the very uneven Marching Songs projects, or Mama Chicago. And if albums live Love/Dreams or Duke’s Birthday are clearly axed as homage, other works like the amazing Cortege or the stupendous present Metropolis can be regarded as his best works, precisely because they stray the farthest away from the Ellington aural realm. Composed in parts as early as late 68, Metropolis had seen many different versions and line-ups until it received its final studio form in the summer of 71, recorded over three days in the famous Lansdowne studios. Graced with an outstanding and atypical (for jazz circles) gatefold empty-highway artwork, the 9-movement Metropolis sees a big part of the who’s who in the London Jazz scene as partakers, including stalwarts like Wheeler, Beckett, Lowther, Rutherford, Osborne, Warleigh, Skidmore, Warren, Khan, Taylor, Boyle, Miller, Laurence, Jackson, Marshall and the delicious but discrete Norma Winstone… just to mention those. Yes, we’re in a big-band mode, but we’re definitely not treading the traditional type, but more of a JR/F mode.

Don’t be afraid by the relatively improvised and dissonant intro, because it’s really one of the only two times Metropolis will stray across the un-melodic boundary. Indeed, the second movement opens of wild trumpets to feature an up-tempo JR/F, while Miller’s bass paves the way for Warleigh’s flute and Winstone’s strange vocalising on the third movement. The album will keep on alternating between wild and enthralling fusion moments to more-improvised collective meanderings, and some (but not many) inescapable Ellington-influenced passages. The album reaches some awesome and unsuspected climaxes around the end of the 6th movement, soon enhanced by slow Westbrook-piano and Boyle-guitar, but the 8th movement is also worth the detour and wait. The closing movement is an emotional exchange between Beckett’s trumpet and Westbrook’s piano (and later Taylor’s Rhodes), quite a fitting outro for such an amazing concept suite

Be careful with the BGO label CD-reissue, which screws up heavily on the track-increment thing, though. With this album, Westbrook arrives on the same level as Graham Collier, Michael Garrick, Neil Ardley and Ian Carr in achieving a very British mix of jazz and rock, one that’s fairly different and emancipated of the Atlantic cousin. As far as I am concerned this album is a no-brainer.

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