Fred Van Hove was commissioned by the Middleheim Jazz Festival in Antwerp to write a piece for a large ensemble. He accepted and began creating a group from two of his trios augmented by other musicians he had either worked with before or who were musically suited to those persons. Suite For B...City is a large-scale work full of various intimacies. The nonet -- which features four brass instruments, two saxophones (one of which is played in typically gorgeous style by John Butcher), bandoneon, piano, voice, and percussion -- performs five movements. While Van Hove looked to locations in Antwerp for inspiration and marked them down as source material for the musicians to follow, he nonetheless dislocated the score sufficiently enough to never let them know precisely which part of the town they were in. This was achieved by another ingenious device that traces the history of modern music through the city. Solo, duo, trio, and full-group settings have been created in a freewheeling score to allow for structural elements that are full of enough space to be improvised in by the individual talents of these gifted musicians. In other words, as one listens to Van Hove's piano guiding his merry band of prankish improvisers through time and physical space, it is possible to visit the zoo in the time of late romanticism or impressionism, or have Belgian waffles at a café in the morning in the era of Coltrane. Where humor, architecture, emotions, and musical architecture intersect and borrow from one another is where you will find Van Hove and his orchestra reeling and rollicking on the high wire of musical risk. Antwerp will never be the same. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi

1		Smooth Ascend & Bumpy Descend
2		Town/White
3		Town/Red
4		Bollocks City
5		Tristesse de Joko

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