The Cinematic Orchestra is a Britishjazz and electronicgroup, which formed in the late 1990s by Jason Swinscoe. The band is signed to Ninja Tune, and independent record label. Jason Swinscoe’s experience of playing bass and guitar in bands alongside DJing, introduced many influences and resulted in giving him a head full of ideas, ranging from the sound of jazz bass players, rhythm sections and film soundtracks. Other members include Tom Chant (saxophone), Phil France (double bass), Luke Flowers (drums), Nick Ramm (piano), Stuart McCallum (guitar); former members include Jamie Coleman (trumpet), T. Daniel Howard (drums), Alex James (piano), and Patrick “PC” Carpenter (turntables).
‘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. It is a record which underlines the cinematic in the Cinematic Orchestra.”
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".
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In the last three years 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. They have also toured in Germany, Japan, Italy and Portugal. They have also clocked up the music festival mileage appearing at, amongst others, Homelands and Essential (UK), Sonar (Spain), Celerico De Basto (Portugal), North Sea Jazz and Drum Rhythm (Holland), Cannes (France), Fuji Rock (Japan) and Montreux (Switzerland) and have headlined The Big Chill twice. And are about to play at Royal Albert Hall on 14th November this year.
Sting has tried out practically every genre in the musical universe, so an orchestral rework of his songs seems a natural thing to do. Sting's 'Symphonicities' balances old pop-rock tunes with the Royal Philharmonic's classic sound. "Symphonicities" means to re-imagine some of the star's best known songs with The Police, as well as those from his solo career, in collaboration with a full symphony orchestra (namely The Royal Philharmonic).
Possibly inspired by the fact that people liked his lute-ish renditions of 'Fields Of Gold' and 'Message In A Bottle', this is an album's worth of Police and solo material recreated with orchestras and classical ensembles.
'We Work The Black Seam', as its looping riff is appears theatrical and you can almost see this playing out in a musical or in a movie.
Mainly, though, the re-thinks emphasize what was already there. "Englishman in New York" seems more light and playful through the whimsical strings and wily woodwinds, while the delightful orchestrations in "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" literalize the idea of finding endless pleasure in someone you're smitten with. Few of the melodies get a genuine shake-up, which explains why fans won't be shocked by anything they hear. For that, you have to look to the recent work of a Sting peer. Back in February, Peter Gabriel radically recast pop songs with classical arrangements on his CD "Scratch My Back." He used the orchestra so inventively, they turned the pieces into psychologically potent art songs. (It probably helped that Gabriel left rock instruments behind entirely). By contrast, "Symphonicities," presents rock and classical forms more as respectful collegues than as true friends. They collaborate peacefully.
Although Sting had reservations about how to tackle the problem of maintaining a rhythmic pulse within an orchestral environment. Of course classical music already has a strong rhythmic pulse, but it is a different pulse from the one understood by most rock musicians or the majority of pop fans. Rock and roll is generally reliant on a strong metronomic backbeat; generally a snare on beats two and four in 4/4 time. I imagine this is a legacy from the earlier strict tempo rhythms of the dance bands of the '30s and '40s.
Strict tempo in pop music equates very much to modernism, to the extent that in the current era of dance music, rhythm and tempo are almost exclusively created by machines. Tempo and pulse in a symphonic setting are much more elastic, where the tempo breathes organically alongside the complexity of emotions and drama encoded within the music.
The spirit of reinvention that surrounded the initial approach to these orchestral arrangements Sting said needed to be incorporated into the visual aspects of the show. In collaboration with artistic director Robert Molnar, he visuals, like the new orchestrations, enhanced the emotional and psychological aspects of the songs in concert.
Sting: “I have always had an affinity for classical music. When I was younger I studied a lot of the repertoire for the Spanish guitar and still make a daily practice of playing a number of selections from J.S. Bach, pieces from the cello suites, which fall nicely inside the range of the guitar, the violin partitas and, of course, the lute suites. Not that anyone would want to pay money to hear my efforts in this field. I do it purely for my own enjoyment; sitting at the feet of a master musician like Bach, reading and interpreting his notes on the page and watching and listening to the often astounding decisions he made as a composer, is as close as I get to religious devotion. I am not the first pop musician to borrow ideas wholesale from the Baroque master. "Whenever I Say Your Name," for example, owes a lot of its structural harmony to one of Bach's preludes.
For the song "Russians," which I wrote in 1985 about the cold war, I borrowed the beautiful melody of the love themed "Lieutenant Kije" by Sergei Prokofiev. To this day I feel honored to share regular royalties for that song with the estate of the celebrated Russian composer. The orchestral arranger of "Russians," Vince Mendoza, went even further by also borrowing the opening of Prokofiev's ballet suite "Romeo and Juliet" as a stirring prelude to the song.”
Jónsi initially thought when he was working on the album ‘Go’ he would be making a low-key, acoustic album until, as he says, “somewhere along the line, it just sort of exploded.” That explosion resulted in sheer aural fireworks. It is not a straight ahead pop record, nor rock, folk, ambient or electronic, it encompasses all of these to create an expansive musical palette that’s been brought to life by Jónsi alongside a number of free-spirited collaborators.
These include, Nico Muhly, the Philip Glass protégé who is renowned for his work with Björk, Antony & the Johnsons, Bonnie “prince” billy and Grizzly bear. Muhly has arranged all the songs on ‘Go’, bringing strings, brass and woodwind to dance playfully alongside his offbeat piano playing. In addition he incorporated into the mix the percussive genius of Samuli Kosminen, whose drumming powers many of the songs along, and you have a sonic landscape that bears little relation to anything else around today, yet explodes from the speakers with sheer happiness and wonder, wide-eyed and eager to be heard.
Within every colour of the palette in which this album paints for the listener there are wild cross- rhythms, syncopated flute harmonics, layering of delayed echo voices as if travelling across a vast landscape. The symphonic soundscapes are combined with a rhythmic sensation of train’s engine running.
An article by James Killingsworth describes Grow till tall "a beautiful, the moody, operatic drama" and Hengilas—"a track so intimately arranged that you can distinctly hear the steady-droning horn players gasping periodically for breath—tell an incomplete story."
Although in the classical era the texture of works were typically known to be homophonic, here, in this album the texture is additive, which relates to rock music. However the components of this texture are typically from the classical period i.e. the piece begins with monophony or homophony but gradually becomes polyphonic through the layering of timbres. Especially, as his voice unlike popular music today whereby the vocals seem to polish the song off by creating hook lines for audience members out there, his experimental vocal timbre (large range) just becomes another ingredient into the mix and is treated as a branch of the piece, an equal instrument.
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