Exit! cover
Released

Mats Gustafsson’s trio Fire! features saxophone, electric bass and drums and delivers stripped-down, hard-riffing punk jazz. The expanded version dubbed Fire! Orchestra is… the opposite of that. On this, their 2013 debut release, they are 28 members strong, pulling from the Scandinavian free jazz, avant-noise and underground rock scenes (among the four drummers is the late Thomas Mera Gartz of Swedish psych-trance legends Träd, Gräs och Stenar). The 45-minute piece they perform, recorded on Friday the 13th 2012 and spread across two LP sides, is a big, throbbing vamp – in addition to the aforementioned drummers, they had four bassists and four guitarists, baritone and bass saxophones, bass clarinet and tuba – with frequent Greek-chorus outbursts from an array of brass players and intense, caterwauling vocals from Mariam Wallentin and Sofia Jernberg. This is a sprawling jazz-rock experiment that will remind some listeners of early 1970s work by Carla Bley, or the one-off fusion big band Centipede. And it’s only the beginning of the Fire! Orchestra journey – they’ve made several more equally impressive albums since.

Phil Freeman

Suggestions
Useful Music cover

Useful Music

Jeff Baumeister
Goodbye cover

Goodbye

Paul Motian, Bobo Stenson, Anders Jormin
Questions cover

Questions

Paul Bley Trio
Brown Sugar cover

Brown Sugar

Freddie Roach
V cover

V

Barn Owl
Erta Ale cover

Erta Ale

Paal Nilssen-Love, Large Unit
Elegy cover

Elegy

Theo Bleckmann
I've Known Rivers cover

I've Known Rivers

Anthony Davis, James Newton, Abdul Wadud
Koma Saxo cover

Koma Saxo

Petter Eldh, Koma Saxo
At The Center cover

At The Center

Meat Beat Manifesto