Composer Darrell Katz aims high. In his cantata The Death of Simone Weil he attempts to portray, with the lyrics of his wife Paula Tatarunis and with Boston's Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra (JCAO), the life and death of Simone Weil.

Weil was an enigmatic and disturbing figure. She was raised in a secular, intellectual Jewish household in France, became a Catholic mystic, but ultimately refused baptism. Even as a mystic, Weil was immersed in extreme political activism. She was a witness for peace in the Spanish Civil War, and as a Marxist she worked in a car factory in order to live the life of ordinary working people. She claimed a mystical experience in 1938 while reading George Herbert's poem "Love," and became fascinated with the image of the crucified incarnation of an ever absent, impossibly distant God. Later she became interested in the concept of emptiness as articulated in Buddhism. She died of starvation during World War II, while in her thirties, after refusing to eat anything more than the meager war rations alloted to the French citizens.

Katz previously used Tatarunis' poems with the Jazz Composers Alliance Sax Quartet (I'm Me and You're Not, Brownstone, 1999) and the JCAO (In, Thru, and Out, Cadence, 2003) and of course is not the first composer to set poetry in the context of a jazz-based improvised music: Charlie Haden put music to Langston Hughes poems with the Liberation Music Orchestra (Dream Keeper, Blue Note, 1991); Haden's arranger, Carla Bley, created settings for the verses of the late Paul Haines in the now classic Escalator Over the Hill (JCOA, 1971; reissued by ECM in 2000), and Bley's ex-husband, Michael Mantler set music to words by Samuel Becket (No Answer), Edward Gorey (The Hapless Child, ECM 1975), Harold Pinter (Silence, reissued with No Answer by ECM in 2000) and Paul Auster (Hide and Seek, ECM 2001).

Katz explains in the liner notes to this disc that his model was the Tin Pan Alley composers, and he wanted to compose melodies that are conversational, while keeping text kept clear and "easy to understand." The music of his six-part cantata is quite simple, sometimes even banal, almost opposing the beautiful cerebral texts of Tatarunis and the very expressive and colorful voice of lead vocalist Rebecca Shrimpton. Some of the compositional choices are too obvious, as in the blues accompanying the images of slavery in the poem "Renault" or the liturgical nuances in "November 1938," echoing Weil's visions of the crucifixion and her longing for spiritual release. The music doesn't enhance understanding of the intriguing and iconoclastic Weil but portrays her in obvious and conventional musical definitions and structures. Still it is a grandiose failure. The JCAO, which Katz founded in 1985, is a fine big band that has premiered works by in-residence composers such as Julius Hemphill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Sam Rivers, Henry Threadgill, Laura Andel and many others. Their recent Celebration of the Spirit (CIMP) shows them in a better light.