Like a good Album Club member, I listened to Tsuchi No Ne before the discussion started, so, just based on the cover, I was expecting something more exotic than what I heard: an update on the "big band" sound with a bit of jazz fusion thrown in.
Like others have said, I also struggle to enjoy the strident blaring horn sections so typical of big band jazz. I think I was too often the unwilling listener to that type of music back in the 60s and can't shrug off a personal aversion to that line up of instruments.
On the other hand, the album has various mellower parts with elec keyboards and (although it's not on rostasi's list) what sounded to me like an oboe or clarinet. There are also some nice almost-solo trumpet sections which I liked.
The 21 min track, Kurazuka, was my favourite, and also sums up the best and worst of this album for me:
....starts with a demonstration of the big band sound at its unsettling worst. As I can't write music, I can only transcribe it as: "quiet bit - POW! - quiet bit -POW! - quiet bit - POW!..." But 10 mins in, things had improved tremendously, as we get to the meat of this long track: a series of interludes allowing various musicians to shine as we hear some really enjoyable interplay between piano/trumpt/flute and also some of those slow-building sections that I like so much in jazz fusion. Unfortunately though, it was rather spoiled for me by the dread that the full-on big band ensemble would be back again to shatter the relative calm - as of course it did towards the end.
So this album was a mix of what I like and don't like about jazz. Unfortunately, there was more of the latter than the former, so I can only go to 6/10 I'm afraid Marie.
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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953
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