Not Quite an Orchestra

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications)

This afternoon I found myself reminded of my favorite Ernie Kovacs joke. Its the one about the Great Wall of China: It is not that great, it is not a wall, and it is not even in China; it is in New York, where it is called the Triborough Bridge. I was reminded of the joke because I used this relatively quiet afternoon to revisit one of the many Satoko Fujii albums in my collection. The one I selected was Ninety-Nine Years, described on the album cover was a performance by the Satoko Fujii Orchestra Berlin.

In the spirit of Ernie Kovacs, it turns out that the group performing the music is not an orchestra. I made this clear when I wrote my article about this album:

The name of the group is a bit prankish; but then it would probably be just as prankish to describe it as a “small big band,” which is basically what it is. It consists of tenor saxophonists Matthias Schubert and Gebhard Ullmann, baritone saxophonist Paulina Owczarek, trumpeters Richard Koch, Lina Allemano, and Natsuki Tamura, trombonist Matthias Müller, bassist Jan Roder, and drummers Michael Griener and Peter Orins.

To be fair, the content for the album was recorded at zentri fuge in Berlin on April 2, 2017. However, it was far from the “finished product” that I listened to and the wrote about for my article.

The fact is that the album was not ready for release until the content was processed twice in New York. On October 25, 2017, Peter Orins collected all the recorded material from a generous collection of microphones and took care of all the balancing and mixing to provide an “integrated” sound. Those results were then transformed into the masters used to create the CDs themselves the following November 30. Max Ross was responsible for that final stage in the production process.

In other words, this album was a reminder of the fact that the listening experience is a far cry from what one might hear at a jazz club. Rather, it is a product of several stages of meticulous engineering; and, more often than not, the musicians themselves have little to say about how those stages proceed. In other words, whatever the musicians do in the interest of performance, this listening experience is the final result of how “the sausage is made” long after the performance has concluded!