Kahil El'Zabar's Infinity Orchestra - "Transmigration"

Kahil El'Zabar's Infinity Orchestra - Soul to Groove (Delmark 2007)

Kahil El’Zabar’s Infinity Orchestra – Transmigration / Delmark

I was all set to write-up a party-friendly, spazz-happy record, but to tell you the truth, it just didn’t hold my attention and was really wrong for my current mindset. I need something more random and less hip, something maybe not necessarily mind-blowing, but interesting and exotic and ridiculous. I need to distance myself from the DJs and laptop-artists and solo-outfits and half-cocked ideas and immerse myself in something bigger, some sort of cultural melting pot of styles and backgrounds and musicians. I need something more than a quartet or a quintet or a sextet of players, I need a fucking small village of musical minds playing as one. I need something both new and old, a bridging of eras and mindsets, something that stretches out in all directions with exuberance, excitement and joy, and something celebratory to bring in this holiday weekend. So, what the hell, I’m heading to a port city in the southwest of France to experience the live, multi-layered, ethnic barrage of free jazz, big band, soul-jazz, funk and hip-hop by a 39-piece orchestra. While I may actually be spending this pleasantly cool and quiet Chicago Friday night huddled over my laptop with a Honker’s Ale and an attention hungry cat, as far as my mind and ears are concerned, I’m sitting front-and-center at the National Theater of Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France, drunk on their world-famous wine and smiling broadly at the orchestrating antics of Kahil El’Zabar as he leads his Infinity Orchestra through the rambunctious hour-long set of Transmigration.

El’Zabar is a true Chicago jazz musician; he is multi-talented, highly committed and part of more eccentrically wonderful projects than there is time to list. A product of the AACM, he is a percussionist, arranger, composer, conductor, clothes/costume designer, educator and community leader. As a musician, he began at a young age honing his skills with early incarnations of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and along with playing alongside everyone from Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder and Cannonball Adderley, he has lead and played in groups like the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, the JUBA Collective and the Ritual Trio. There are many other interesting tidbits to El’Zabar’s career as well, for example, clothes designing for Nina Simone, artist in residence/Master of Carnival in Bordeaux, or arranging the stage performances of The Lion King, but we really should concentrate on the album at hand.

The origination of the Infinity Orchestra reaches back to 1978 when El’Zabar pieced together an all-Chicago ensemble that let him experiment with his increasingly ambitious big-band compositions. In fact, one piece from those experimental days appears on this release, the album closer “Return of the Last Tribe.” Inspired then by the works of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Archie Shepp’s big-band excursions and now influenced by myriad of geographically concentrated styles including free jazz in France (especially BYG Actuel releases, though not nearly as challenging), indigenous African percussion (most notably the balafon and djembe) and American rap and turntablism, El’Zabar has arranged and orchestrated a skillfully performed and joyous album with his French 39-piece cross-generational ensemble in Transmigration, which may not be perfect, but is certainly a treat to experience.

The album opens with the very curious “Soul to Groove,” certainly not what I was expecting at least. Kicking off with a turntable solo, a solo free jazz tenor sax enters two minutes later wailing away like there’s no tomorrow. It’s not cheesy in the least, which in itself is a success. Bombastic orchestra cheers and funky guitar riffing egg on the duet before dissolving back to just solo turntable once again; it is certainly not the first pair of the two genres, but it is handily pulled off. Now “Nu Art Claiming Earth” on the other hand is not nearly as successful and actually bends toward unlistenable. This times rhymes are added to the mix care of French rapper Bindi Mahamat, and with no offense to his flow, it just doesn’t work. The song drags on for fifteen-minutes through a barrage of different movements, but if anything, just disenchants the promising album opener.

The centerpiece of Transmigration is the 24-minute “Speaking in Tongues,” though while simple from an arrangement standpoint contains fantastic musicianship and is a very rewarding track. Kicking off with the melodic percussive sound of the balafon, a West African xylophone of sorts, it meanders through three phases each spotlighting a different soloist, trumpeter Piero Pepin, clarinetist Jean Dousteyssier, and alto saxophonist Benoit Berthe. Like every solo on the disc, they are inspired and fantastic, and in fact, the solos are the main attraction of the album. On “Return of the Lost Tribe,” the only two non-French musicians, Chicagoans Ernest Dawkins (New Horizons Ensemble) and Joseph Bowie (Defunkt) each provide emotional outbursts to the grooving orchestral swing led by El’Zabar. Again, it would be a far cry to call any of it classic, but it is very enjoyable and a much-welcomed aural escape from most of what gets released these days.

So after a ridiculously jading week, it feels great to lose myself in the heart-felt eccentricities of Kahil El’Zabar and his orchestra. No it won’t win you many cool points in the hipster realm of things and no it won’t blow your mind from a musical you-have-never-experienced-something-like-this-before standpoint, but it will put a grin on your face, make your head sway and probably send you to the liner notes a couple times to see who just ripped that ridiculous clarinet solo. What else could you want? A bottle of Bordeaux’s world-famous wine? Well yeah, me too.