Stan Tracey Octet: The Later Works

In the kind of ironic contrast jazz musicians love, these two suites for Stan Tracey's octet were written for the last British governor of Hong Kong and premiered at his private residence, and for the merger that produced the Unison trade union, premiered less glamorously in a Newcastle hotel. Tracey's tactic remains the same, clothing the punchy rifflike melody or the smoky love song in richly coloured jazz-horn harmonies Duke Ellington would have been proud to have inspired. The Hong Kong Suite's rocking Moon Cake (with its swaggeringly hip tenor and trumpet solos), and the whoops and hoots of the flying Crackers and Bangers, are typical Tracey. The Unison-celebrating Amandla Suite feels freer in its references, from the exuberant piano intro over a bass-walk on Cottons and Bobbins, through the mock dance-band Latin bounce of The Cuban Connection to the hurtling rising line of the finale. Improvisers of the quality of trumpeter Guy Barker, tenorists Simon Allen and Mornington Lockett, and trombonist Mark Nightingale, illuminate the solo sections.