Carla Bley - Appearing Nightly [CD]

Carla Bley and her Remarkable Big Band, as the cover has it, in a resolutely contemporary performance of nostalgia-inflected material, recorded live at Paris's New Morning club. The album showcases rich and robust performances of new Bley material (plus an arrangement of a Ray Noble chestnut) with particularly stellar contributions by saxophone soloists Andy Sheppard and Wolfgang Puschnig, by trumpeter Lew Soloff, and trombonist Gary Valente. Centrepiece of the album is the 25 minute title track Appearing Nightly at the Black Orchid - commissioned for the Monterey Jazz Festival and heard here in a premiere recording.