Callum Allardice: Cinematic Light Orchestra (digital outlets)

Wellington guitarist/composer Callum Allardice has appeared a few times at Elsewhere but never with an album under his own name.

But his time really has come with this ambitious album. 

Among other accolades, Allardice has won three APRA composition awards (2016, 2017, 2019), one of his bands The Jac was a jazz album of the year finalist in 2014 and won it in 2020 with their third album A Gathering.

He brought his mercurial playing and compositions to the group Good Winter and Dave Wilson's orchestrated Ephemeral album last year.

More importantly in the present context, he was the first jazz composer in residence at Te Kōkī/New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University in 2022. From that has come this expansive album influenced by, and perhaps – as on the programmatic narrative of The Vibe – designed for, soundtracks.

Allardice here commands five saxophones, eight horns, 10 string players and a jazz quartet in which he plays which offers a symphonic reach befitting an IMAX sound system.

In places owing as much to big band jazz as film composers like Star Wars' John Williams (the fanfare on Unknown Peril) and Gustav Holst' The Planets (the heroic Phobos and Deimos errs to both), there is however space for jazz solos from Luke Sweeting's piano (The Vibe), saxophone (The Jac's Jake Baxendale on Sacrament) and, of course, guitar (Allardice sometimes executing Pat Metheny's fluid and silvery tone, sky-scaling playing on the march of Patience).

The sheer heft and internal diversity here – three pieces around 10 minutes with jazz improvisation between sections for strings and horns – can make for a forbidding proposition.

But those contrasts are also the strengths of this not so light orchestra.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.