“A Nordic Sound-Against All Odds” quote’s

Great Review from Italy 

Jens Wendelboe “Against All Odds” (Losen Records).

Sophisticated arrangements, fresh swing and elegant jazz in the creative album of Jens Wendelboe (trombone, Norwegian composer, music organizer and orchestra director, known for collaboration with artists such as Slide Hamptone Phil Woods) He accompanies us together with his trusted musicians, including Keith Gurland (high saxophone), Joel A. Martin, Kris Yunker (keys), Ryan Parrino (guitar), Michael Nunno (bass), Tyger MacNeal (drums), on this ‘lonely’ musical adventure. As a conductor the sounds of Bobby Watson, Gil Evans, the cultural identity of African American music and the funk groove. Twelve well-defined tracks (the great After the Snow and Return From Forever) with intelligent, sensitive and well-constructed soundities of modern jazz, showcasing a rotating cast of musicians, many of them, ambitious and engaging. Jens Wendelboe from life to a new way of narrating and playing black reality and collective improvisation sections.

Contemporary Jazz/ hard bop.

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Quote from a Slovakia Review.

Patrick Spanko at SKJAZZ, Slovakia  with a review of Jens Wendelboe Big Band Google translated into English:

A Nordic Sound – An American Jazz Orchestra. The album also features songs, sung by Stephanie Harrison, to lyrics by Kari Iveland. Project boss Jens Wendelboe has a few solos on trombone. Don’t expect any Nordic sound with a gloomy atmosphere or a winding wind, but a fresh big band swing, firmly anchored in tradition, with sleek arrangements. Everything is nicely composed, arranged and balanced, hand in hand, it’s a singing and soloing party. The result is simply a great American production for orchestral swing lovers!

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All About Jazz

The Persistence Of Big Bands

 

BY GENO THACKARA

December 4, 2021

It’s a milieu that still enjoys plenty of devotion, and musicians (especially jazz players) are no strangers to realizing ideas that seem practically impossible.

It’s faintly amazing to be able to talk at all about big-band recordings—plural—emerging during an ongoing pandemic with no end in sight. Nonetheless it’s a milieu that still enjoys plenty of devotion, and musicians (especially jazz players) are no strangers to realizing ideas that seem practically impossible. Here we have scores of them willing to keep the tradition alive, whatever the difficulties.

 

Jens Wendelboe

Against All Odds

Losen Records

2021

You’ll be disappointed if you’re hoping for a brisk swinging Phil Collins cover or two, but the hearty party of Against All Odds still offers plenty to like. While a casual listener could easily believe Jens Wendelboe had simply booked a studio for nineteen players and a vocalist, this is a collage that took months to come together. The rhythm section set down the basic tracks just before 2020’s first shutdown, and so there was an organic foundation to follow. The horn players were then able to do their thing in groups of four weeks apart, with various others recording more bits and pieces at home.

Logistics aside, the finished product bounces as brightly as it was always meant to in person. Wendelboe’s compositions show as much soul as you’d expect from someone whose R&B pedigree includes Donna Summer and Earth, Wind & Fire. The collective breezes through brisk- paced Latin dance, cheerful march and urban funk jam with equal aplomb. If “Chasing Rainbows” feels out of place because it really belongs in an animated Disney film instead, it’s still rendered with the wide-eyed sincerity it deserves. Likewise, this whole hour makes it easy to simply enjoy the results and forget the “odds.”

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jazz-fun.de says: If you take into account the conditions under whichthis music was created, you can say that we are dealing with some kind of masterpiece. There is excellently implemented music for big band, there are vocal parts and solo parts. Everything is balanced and, above all, composed and arranged in such a way that this music can be compared to great American productions. Great album! Beautiful, emotional music!
All the best, Jacek. jazz-fun.de Online Magazin für Jazz Musik

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