Snarky Puppy: Sylva (2LP) [IMPULSE]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set plays across three sides, with an etched design on the fourth. Sylva won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, pairing the jazz collective with the Netherlands' Metropole Orkest under Jules Buckley.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Etched side D
• Pressed in the USA

About the album

Most bands bring a few friends on stage; Snarky Puppy brought an entire orchestra. Bandleader Michael League wrote and produced Sylva for the group and the Metropole Orkest, and they recorded and filmed it live in front of an audience at Het Energiehuis in Dordrecht on April 19 and 20, 2014, with Jules Buckley conducting.

League has said each piece is about a different forest, and the music moves like it. "Sintra" opens with sweeping strings and brass, "Flight" and "Atchafalaya" build on deep fusion grooves, "The Curtain" and "Gretel" give the soloists room to stretch, and the epic "The Clearing" takes up a full side on its own. Cory Henry's Hammond organ, Bill Laurance's piano and three electric guitarists, Bob Lanzetti, Mark Lettieri and Chris McQueen, sit inside a full symphonic palette of strings, woodwinds, horns and percussion. Eric Hartman mixed it in Dallas and Scott Hull mastered it at Masterdisk in New York.

It is jazz fusion on a cinematic scale, as rewarding on headphones as it was in the room. Six pieces, six forests, and not a single mosquito.

Also at Kops: more Snarky Puppy on vinyl · browse Modern Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Impulse! (cat# 472 225 9), the 2015 album.