Nguyen Le/Michael Gibbs/NDR Bigband: Celebrating The Dark Side of the Moon review

A jazz big-band version of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon feels like a risky endeavour, but earlier Beatles and Zappa tributes by Germany’s NDR Bigband testify to their credentials. This celebration has a similar spiritedness in the hands of the UK’s Michael Gibbs (on all the orchestrations and three arrangements), French-Vietnamese guitarist and arranger Nguyen Le, and Korea’s Youn Sun Nah, a flexible vocalist capable of vaulting from poised intimacy to a rock-singer’s abrasive wail. Gibbs and Le avoid jazz habits, turning Time into an extended tone-poem of whistling wind-sounds, chimes, bursting orchestral exclamations and shapely guitar improv; or mingling guitar and trumpet lines vividly on the jazz-rockish Great Gig in the Sky; but the famous Money (with the guitar taking the vocal part) does lack the implacable, thudding focus of the Roger Waters version. It’s Floyd-inspired but not just a set of straight covers – so it’s a contemporary big-band set with inspirational material, which is no bad place to be.