Colin Towns, the former prog-rocker whose soundtrack-composing career has allowed him to make radiantly rich-hued jazz as a hobby, is putting his 25-year-old Mask Orchestra back on the road. This set focuses on Towns’s theatre music, with jazz-steeped pieces written for UK productions including Macbeth, Lear, The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Terry Johnson’s Hysteria. They are played by a bespoke band including saxophonist Tim Garland, trumpeter Henry Lowther and guitarist Chris Montague. Towns’s harmonic palette, idiomatic playfulness (sometimes reminiscent of Carla Bley) and Stravinskyesque energy have created music for a function that nonetheless stands tall without it. Cossack dances mix with early jazz polyphony in The Cherry Orchard; trumpet screams and drifting choral tones shiver through Macbeth; free-jazzy horn hubbubs punctuate Equus; blues-rock guitar sounds and martial stampings mingle in Royal Hunt of the Sun. Towns’s other life makes him an unjustly peripheral figure in the UK jazz world – he deserves to be right in the middle of it.
