There are different ways jazz musicians approach known songs. They can, of course, be played lovingly and faithfully, or worse faithfully and without love. They can be brought into new traditions (like Coltrane's career-spanning use of "My Favorite Things") or cheekily juxtaposed against tradition (Steve Bernstein in the nineties, The Bad Plus in the aughties). In all such cases, a recognizable melody (i.e. Duke Ellington or Kurt Cobain) is crucial to making the point.
Bassist Simon H. Fell may be up to something along one of these lines in his (Re)Composition No. 49: Views of Mancini, but it's far from easy to tell which. The piece dates back to 1999 and was written for jazz trio plus "sound manipulator" (someone sampling Mancini, originally off tapes, although here turntables are added to excellent effect). Fell writes in the liner notes of his admiration for Mancini as the "jobbing" composer, and of his own work playing both commercial and experimental music, suggesting a labor of love at work. The new recording presented here retains percussionist Steve Noble in the sound manipulator role from the performance of a decade ago, and brings in Pat Thomas on piano and Han Bennink on drums. It's hard to imagine a better ensemble for the project: they share a strong sense for jazz, improvisation, noise and humor. Whether or not they were using their senses of humor here, it certainly didn't hurt.
The formula often seems to be using the prerecorded pieces to state the themes (often in fractured ways) and then improvising over, on top of, or all over them. Thomas' low, rumbling piano and Fell's quick bass jabs fall in with the disorientingly swirling movie themes disconcertingly well, the deep tones meshing closely with the prerecorded sounds. Much of the time, the music as a whole is merely echoing the source material in such a way as to induce seasickness. Moments of solidity — such as Bennink insistently pounding out the Peter Gunn theme against a kaleidoscopic wash of sounds — only underscore the record's confusion. It is fantastically hard to pin down.
Fell's Mancini isn't entirely without precedent. Steve Beresford's Doris Day and John Zorn's Ennio Morricone come to mind. But there's an important distinction. This record is crazy. Not in a wacky Ween Zappa way, but manic paranoid delusional schizoid certifiable something is wrong and I can only see the world through this little slit I've made in the window shade crazy. It's light and dark. It's funny and a little bit frightening. And it's 45 minutes well spent, many times over.
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