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Keith Tippett Tapestry Orchestra

Live at Le Mans

Red Eye Music redeye008

Commissioned by the BBC, performed at the Bath Festival and in Europe, but never recorded in a studio as intended, this extended (87-minute) work by Keith Tippett, 'First Weaving', might have been specially written to fit the expression tour de force.

Although probably most frequently experienced these days as a solo improvising pianist or the heart of the free quartet Mujician, Tippett is also justly celebrated as a peerless deployer of large musical forces (Centipede the most famous example), and in this concert, recorded in Le Mans in 1998, he weaves together seven 'Threads' to form a complex but consistently accessible, at times exhilarating musical whole.

Given that the 21-piece band contains musicians such as Pino Minafra, Paul Rutherford, Larry Stabbins, Simon Picard, Gianluigi Trovesi, Elton Dean, Loius Moholo, the members of Mujician, plus other longtime associates and singers Julie Tippetts, Maggie Nicols and Vivien Ellis, the music is able to draw on free improvisation as readily as on more conventional big-band features such as massively swinging precision section work, call-and-response sections, extended solo features over hospitable chord sequences etc. etc., and the tension between such freedom and structure is one of the piece's great strengths.

What most immediately impresses, though, is the sheer visceral energy and imaginative vigour displayed throughout: to wield this much power without ever slipping into bombast is an extraordinary achievement, and Tippett – although he must regret not having been able to muster the financial resources needed to produce a definitive version in the studio – has proved himself a master, yet again, at producing fine, affecting, subtle art that audibly draws on the jazz tradition but which is simultaneously intensely personal and moving. Recommended.