The Cinematic Orchestra
March 14th, 2007 by rui
Pete Lawrence on The Cinematic Orchestra…
"When I first heard tracks from the new album from The Cinematic Orchestra, I knew instantly that I had no choice in the matter – they simply had to be booked! Having known Jason Swinscoe since he was working full time in the Ninja Tune offices, and watched with interest as his early vision unfolded, the band feels very much like ‘family’ now, and the new record ‘Ma Fleur’ will surprise people with its new directions, not least for a trio of guest vocalists, of which Montreal based Patrick Watson particularly impresses on the emotive single ‘To Build a Home’. Raw emotion runs through this album’s subject matter of loss and love. Truly human and utterly beautiful."
Upcoming live dates…
Tuesday 30th October – Leeds University
Wednesday 31st October -Bristol, Colston Hall
Thursday 1st November – Coventry, Warwick Arts Centre
Friday 2nd October – London, The Royal Albert Hall
The Cinematic Orchestra in 2007
May 7th sees the release of the first full studio album by Jason Swinscoe’s Cinematic Orchestra since 2002′s "Everyday". Entitled "Ma Fleur," the record was written as the soundtrack to a specially commissioned screenplay for an imagined film (which may or may not yet be made).
Shortly after finishing "Everyday," a piece of music which achieved great critical and commercial success (selling over 100,000 units) Jason Swinscoe relocated from East London to Paris. Here he began work on the instrumentals which would form the basis of his new record – more moods than finished tracks, a series of sketches or diagrams of directions to follow. Having completed a rough version by early 2005, he gave this to a friend who disappeared for 3 weeks and came back with short story scripts in which each track represented a scene. Jason then took this and worked some more on the tracks, and in turn gave this back to his scriptwriter, the two aspects of the project developing alongside one another.
Gradually, Swinscoe recruited suitable vocalists for the atmospheres and themes he wanted to deal with. The remarkable Fontella Bass (the woman behind both legendary soul number "Rescue Me" as well as some of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s finest moments) had worked on "Everyday" and was an obvious choice to voice the parts of the elderly protagonist that Swinscoe envisaged. Mercury-nominated Lou Rhodes is not only a fantastic singer but a young mother and so perfect for the "mid-life" singer. The as-yet unheralded Patrick Watson, a remarkable vocalist from Montreal, became the youngest of the trio.
Swinscoe, now based in New York, then filled out the arrangments with the band and assistance from his old collaborator, bassist Phil France. As a final part of the process, renowned New York photographer Maya Hayuk was commissioned to take pictures to represent each of the scenes/tracks. These pictures, scenes where the characters are missing or abstracted or metaphoric, would once again feed back into world of the soundtrack for a missing film.
Dealing with themes of loss and love – and in itself representing a kind of absence – "Ma Fleur" is fertile ground for Swinscoe’s brand of music-making, for while people have talked about what he does in terms of jazz, the truth is that the basis of his music has always been in raw emotion. From the achingly beautiful opener "To Build A Home" to the finale, "Time And Space," this is an album which reaches for and finds a truth and honesty far beyond what we would normally expect from such a record, but without losing any of the accessibility which made TCO popular in the first place. If the mood is melancholy, Swinscoe and the musicians he works with manage to make it an ultimately uplifting experience, perhaps in the end more about the love you find than the love you lose…
Links
www.cinematicorchestra.com
The Cinematic Orchestra wiki
The Cinematic Orchestra – Offical Myspace site
Cinematic Orchestra downloads
The Cinematic Orchestra: 1999 – 2006
The aptly named Cinematic Orchestra (TCO) were formed by 30 year old J. Swinscoe back in 1999. At the time Jay was still an employee at Ninja Tune in South London, where he was responsible for export sales at the long-standing independent record label. Swinscoe arrived at London Bridge from Scotland via Yorkshire and Cardiff with a background playing bass and guitar in bands and DJing, as well as a head full of ideas and influences, such as his love of jazz bass players, rhythm sections and film soundtracks. So while he knocked out Mr. Scruff and Coldcut records to Spain and Scandinavia by day, he began putting together the TCO album in his downtime.
‘Motion’
Taking on the role of bandleader, Swinscoe rallied a group of adventurous jazz players and delivered a debut album that took everyone by surprise and was voted album of the year by listeners to Gilles Peterson’s Radio One show. And more than a few other programmes too! It is a record which underlines the cinematic in the Cinematic Orchestra, with Uncut likening it to "every hard-boiled, neon-lit Hollywood thriller you’ve seen, the sound of a thousand femmes fatales, doomed P.I.’s and bitter plot twists remixed and refashioned in one ingeniously sampled audio narrative".
‘Motion’ was followed in 2001 by an album of TCO remixes of other artists (‘Remixes 98-2000′!) which garnered more critical acclaim and also caught the imagination of the broadsheets, with The Guardian heaping praise upon both Jay’s sense of space and his attention to detail: "It’s frighteningly rare that a musician in a contemporary field brings so much generous knowledge and that transforming power to their work, inviting you inside their world and introducing you to a new way of listening".
‘Every Day’
If ‘Motion’ reflected the cinematic aspect of TCO, their second album ‘Every Day’, brought out more of the orchestral side, too. Arguably a more refined record than its predecessor, it is uncompromising in its approach nonetheless. And in these production-line, rebirth-of-the-pop-idol times, ten minute tunes and seven tracks on an album are hardly the norm. But evidently the Cinematics do their own thing very well.
On ‘Every Day’, Swinscoe worked with bass player Phil France as his co-pilot and co-producer, France’s background in jazz the perfect counterpoint to Swinscoe’s technical knowhow and raw feel. The pair flew out to St. Louis to record the legendary Fontella Bass (of ‘Rescue Me’ and Art Ensemble of Chicago fame) for the single ‘All That You Give’ and ‘Evolution’, both of which appeared on the album. Closer to home, they enlisted the talents of Mercury and Brit nominated South London rapper Roots Manuva on the soul searching ‘All Things To All Men’.
‘Every Day’ also features the drumming of modern-day jazz legend Luke Flowers , who had played together with France for a number of years as youthful stars on the northern jazz circuit. Another name on the same scene was the much travelled fellow Mancunian, keyboard player John Ellis who played on the ‘Everyday’ album and toured live. He has now been replaced by another Mancunian Steve Brown for the start of the Man With A Movie Camera dates and beyond. Next up, and a fixture at left of centre jazz gigs all over the world, is 24 year old saxophonist Tom Chant, who is known as one of the UK’s top free jazz players. Turntablist PC, meanwhile, is one of the original Ninjas, for many years the studio backbone of the label and an integral part of the DJ Food project.
Live
The Cinematics have played far and wide at every conceivable type of venue and on all kinds of occasion. They have shocked out from the Jazz Café to the Jazz Bop via Ronnie Scott’s. And in somewhat hardcore fashion they toured the North American Jazz Festival circuit in the back of a transit van, with the dates culminating in a prestigious support slot for John McLaughlin in Central Park.
They have toured in Germany, Japan, Italy and Portugal. They have also clocked up the music festival mileage appearing at, amongst others, The Big Chill (UK), Sonar (Spain), Celerico De Basto (Portugal), North Sea Jazz and Drum Rhythm (Holland), Cannes (France), Fuji Rock (Japan) and Montreux (Switzerland).
Other live highlights include playing at the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award for Stanley Kubrick by the Directors Guild. Also the ‘Every Day’ album launch when the Hanover Grand was dressed and draped with red velvet curtains and Chinese lanterns and new TCO singer Niara Scarlett battled it out with Fontella Bass.
The Film Live
Suitably enough for a group who have become something of a household name in Portugal, Swinscoe and co. were commissioned to write and perform a new score for Dziga Vertov’s avant garde 1929 silent film ‘Man With The Movie Camera’, as the opening event celebrating the northern Portuguese city of Porto’s year as European City of Culture for 2001.
Although Swinscoe had heard of Vertov, he had never seen the film and the credit for the idea and the hook-up rests with Dario Oliveira and Miguel Dias. Themselves experts in both movies and music, the pair have run the International Short Film Festival at Vila do Conde for more than ten years. As a big fan of film soundtracks and the likes of Bernard Hermann (‘Taxi Driver’, ‘The Birds’, ‘North By North West’) and John Lurie (‘African Summer’, ‘Down By Law’), Jay set about the mission with great enthusiasm. Having run the film/club Loop for the preceding year he was also well equipped for the task.
Following some frenzied rehearsals somewhere in South East London, the band performed Swinscoe’s soundtrack live in Porto’s splendid Coliseu theatre in May 2000 in front of an audience of 3500 and received a tumultuous ten minute standing ovation for their troubles. They were even forced to come up out of the orchestra pit and onstage to do an ad hoc TCO live set, because the punters just wouldn’t go home!
Subsequent to the appearance in Porto, TCO soundtracked the film twice in Istanbul, then again in both Glasgow and Edinburgh last summer as part of the Tryptych Festival. At the George Square Theatre in the Scottish capital, they played behind the cinema screen aleaving half of the audience astonished when it was raised at the end of the performance to reveal the players.
