''Renee Rosnes, the 41-year-old classically trained pianist from Canada, built her considerable reputation in the jazz world as a creative partner for such saxophone legends as Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter. Here, she sets six of her own compositions against backdrops painted by the state-run Danish Radio Big Band, led by American pianist and arranger Jim McNeely. The orchestra's twisting section-work and sophisticated soloists usually echo the music of its first influence, the late Thad Jones; here, the spacier sound of a Gil Evans band almost overshadows that, and it is clearly the rich ambiguities of the era of Evans's work with Miles Davis that Rosnes is interested in.
Yet the associations of this music run much wider than a revisit to a classic jazz era. The leader's opener, Ancestors, has a McCoy Tyner feel in its emphatic, sermonising quality. Bulldog's Chicken Run has a churning restlessness and some reverberating low chords that make it sound at first like a West Side Story theme reinterpreted by Charles Mingus. Trumpeter Thomas Fryland plays a delicate and eloquently balletic solo on the thoughtful McNeely original In This Moment, while Rosnes's relentless, faintly sinister Black Holes accelerates into brass flares and thick trombone sounds before giving way to a sweeping piano solo. Orion's Belt sounds like slick, contemporary big-band jazz without getting under the skin, but a trumpet solo reminiscent of early-1950s Miles from the excellent Henrik Bolberg Pedersen lifts it. Not quite up to the promise of this collaboration, but full of bright moments.'' The Guardian