I've just read an interesting short article about modern takes on "Passion" musical 'genre' that seemed long-gone until Krzysztof Penderecki brought it up again the middle of the last century. Passion of Jesus Christ became a subject of modern readings that would often omit entirely the religious message and search for more modern and alternatives readings - like "Jesus Christ Superstar", like controversial "Last Temptation of the Christ", but could also go way back before the time of Bach into the contemplative aura of medieval harmonies as in Arvo Part's "Passio".
(polish readers can find the article
here, others can use the link to follow the youtube clips it proposes.)
So I thought about writing a short note about two jazz cds that fit well into this subject (both of them were played during the last radio program too).
The Passion
Undivided:
Waclaw Zimpel - bass clarinet, clarinet, tarogat
Bobby Few - piano
Mark Tokar - double bass
Klaus Kugel - drums
Multikulti 2010
This cd got some decent exposure, winning the
Happy New Ears poll on well-known Stef's blog. Fact is that it may be one of the most ambitious projects in jazz music for quite a while. Waclaw Zimpel composed "Passion" as a collage of vocal and instrumental themes from the subject's musical history, adding his own parts to it and glueing and expanding thus created rhetorics with improvisation in an effort to create a musical and universal reflection about pain and sorrow, as described in biblical Passion of the Jesus Christ.
Undivided:
