To approximate the first half of
Fred Ho
's album
Year of the Tiger
, it's necessary to imagine the sound that might be created if the members of
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra
were mixed with the players from
Parliament
/
Funkadelic
and set loose on the
Michael Jackson
and
Jimi Hendrix
catalogs. That's right, songs like
"Thriller"
"Purple Haze"
get severely retrofitted into an aggressive, irreverent jazz-funk style, with harsh, massed horn parts. Sometimes, the sound resembles a couple of high-school marching bands fighting it out on the same football field. In the second part of the album,
Ho
takes a more conventional jazz approach, that is, if "conventional" can be taken to mean a post-bop big-band style in which a horn ensemble is employed for avant-garde purposes. And then there's the children's chorus that pipes up on the Oriental-styled
"Hero Among Heroes."
This is ambitious, challenging jazz, occasionally made somewhat more accessible by the leader's evident zany sense of humor. ~ William Ruhlmann