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" and "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 ...
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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" and "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, Rovi
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