Vince Mendoza Revisits Metropole Orkest

At the beginning of this month, Modern Recordings released the latest album of Vince Mendoza, entitled Olympians. In consulting my archives, I discovered that I have not written about Mendoza since 2019. His “comfort zone” is with large jazz ensembles, which he leads in performances of his own arrangements and compositions. My “first contact” with one of those compositions was Constant Renaissance, a three-movement suite written on a commission from Temple University in Philadelphia; and I wrote about the recording he made with the Temple University Studio Orchestra, which had been released in August of 2019.  He was not a complete stranger to me, because, in June of that same year, I had written about Begin Again, an album recorded in Studio A of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German broadcasting, WDR) in Cologne, where pianist Fred Hersch performed with the seventeen members of the WDR Big Band.

Mendoza recorded Olympians with the Metropole Orkest, for which he had served as Chief Conductor between 2005 and 2013. The ensemble is based in Hilversum in the Netherlands, where it is managed and subsidized by Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (Netherlands Public Broadcasting). The ensemble is definitely “orchestral,” with a full complement of strings performing along with a generous share of winds, brass, and percussion, along with a harp added for good measure!

Dianne Reeves singing while Vince Mendoza conducts approvingly (photograph by Rick Swig, courtesy of DL Media)

Like Constant Renaissance, Olympians is a suite, this time consisting of nine movements and lasting for about an hour. Two of the tracks involve two different vocalists, Dianne Reeves and Cécile McLorin Salvant. There are also guest instrumental soloists, the one most familiar to me being tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, who has also established himself as a leader of jazz ensembles.

This all makes for an impressive gathering of technical expertise. Nevertheless, while I found myself impressed with the diverse approaches to instrumentation that permeate all nine tracks of the album, neither the sonorities nor the phrases of the tunes themselves prompted me to sit up and take notice. This may be due in some part to the extent to which most of the tracks have an endurance that overstays their respective welcomes. I suspect that, on the basis of past listening experiences, I had expected sharper edges; but other listeners may appreciate this new release for other reasons.