American bassist and composer Michael Formanek worked with jazz names as famous as Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard in the 1980s, but he subsequently became a big wheel in New York’s experimental circles. Formanek usually works in small formats, but Ensemble Kolossus is a dramatic 18-piece, including star avantists such as saxist Tim Berne, trumpeter Ralph Alessi, pianist Kris Davis, and guitarist Mary Halvorson. The title track is a vaporous tone-poem of slow horn-section outbreaths and delectable harmonies, while the other tracks comprise Formanek’s ambitious eight-part Exoskeleton suite. The luminous voicings of the 40s Birth of the Cool band or the slinky blues-swing of a Charles Mingus group appear in glimpses, but spiky melodies are as prevalent as mellifluous ones, while no-prisoners solos are bookended by low-register vamps and fast-moving ensemble parts fizzing with chases and echoes. It’s a visionary big-band project, but for all Formanek’s sensitivity to jazz history, traditionalists should note that the improvisers’ extended flights don’t shrink from the free-improv edge.
