Personel: Aaron Bennett (sax), Adam Lane (b), Darren Johnston (t), Jeff Chan (ts), John Finkbeiner (g), Lynn Johnston (bs), Vijay Anderson (d)

Adam Lane is doing some magic. If you didn’t noticed, here’s a new opportunity you shouldn’t miss. And why? Because the bassist, composer and arranger is taking the big band format in jazz (in this case a septet) some steps beyond. You know there’s not much happening nowadays in this field.

Even the best examples of good orchestral work follow the same old patterns, without adding anything really new to what was done before. The Full Throttle Orchestra is an exception. Lane has Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus as references for his work, but not to reproduce their ideas, solutions and techniques, as many others simply do. For him, the large ensemble musics of the two masters are seeds for a different crop in what concerns creativity, giving a future to a music genre that almost can’t move with the weight of its past.

That’s his magic and its not a common feature. The fact that we can find some ingredients of classical contemporary music and of rock in the pieces he composes and conducts aren’t sufficient explanations for the difference – that’s only for flavor, fullfiling the nature of jazz to include in its corpus all the sounds crossing its way. “New Magical Kingdom” is an efective demonstration of something else: a change in attitude. Without making a fuss about it, Adam Lane is reinventing the format, and he does it with a very special and fruitful competence.