Liberation Music Orchestra (album)
| Liberation Music Orchestra | |||||
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| Studio album by Charlie Haden | |||||
| Released | January 1970 | ||||
| Recorded | April 27–29, 1969 Judson Hall, New York City |
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| Genre | Avant-garde jazz | ||||
| Length | 51:16 | ||||
| Label |
Impulse! AS-9183 |
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| Producer | Charlie Haden | ||||
| Charlie Haden chronology | |||||
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| Liberation Music Orchestra chronology | |||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide | |
Liberation Music Orchestra is a band and jazz album by Charlie Haden released in 1970, Haden's first as leader.
The inspiration for the album came when Haden heard songs from the Spanish Civil War. He included three of those songs on the album (the trilogy "El Quinto Regimiento", "Los Cuatro Generales", and "Viva la Quince Brigada", which are old Spanish folk songs given new words during the war, in that order "El Vito", previously adapted by John Coltrane as “Olé", "Los Cuatro Muleros", for which Federico García Lorca also wrote lyrics, and "Ay Carmela").
Other tracks on the album include Ornette Coleman's "War Orphans", which Haden had played with Coleman in 1967, three pieces by Carla Bley, who also contributed much of the arranging, two of Haden's own compositions, one dedicated to Che Guevara and one inspired by the 1968 National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party:
In "Circus '68 '69" the musicians are thus divided into two bands in recreation of the events on the convention floor.
The Liberation Music Orchestra's next album, The Ballad of the Fallen, didn't appear until 1983.
Lester Bangs' Rolling Stone review stated "The arrangements by Carla Bley are miracles of dynamics, rising and falling in volume and velocity and the awe-inspiring balance of collective ensembles improvising freely through swellings and contractions of individual voices entering and leaving the mysterious swirling circle of simultaneous songs as diverse as the number of performers yet never lacking in the kind of transporting telepathic unity that makes this multiplicity of musical lines such a far cry from the chaos of the charlatans in other sections of the avant-garde hiding under the mantle of these geniuses. An extremely tight, moving substantial record."
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Wikipedia