Towering, Funky, Innovative Big Band Jazz From Organist Matthias Bublath’s Eight Cylinder Bigband

From the first few spiraling seconds of the intro to the first track on the Eight Cylinder Bigband’s debut album – streaming at Spotify – it’s obvious that this is not your average large jazz ensemble. Other than Dr. Lonnie Smith’s octet, this may be the only big band in the world led by a jazz organist. Matthias Bublath orchestrates his song with innovatively intricate flair, matching that with his attack on the keys. There’s a deep New Orleans funk influence here, but that’s often cached beneath many layers.

The result sometimes requires a lot of rapidfire, meticulous playing from the eighteen-piece group, and they deliver. The first number, Midnight Intro is a starry Hollywood Hills boudoir funk groove beefed up with judicious orchestral swells and an energetically melisamtic solo from lead trumpeter Takuya Kuroda.

Nice Green Bo has some nice call-and-response over funky syncopation, part 70s Crusaders, part darkly blustery, cinematic theme, a lithely dancing alto sax solo at the center as the organ swirls and pulses in the background. Eventually, the bandleader adds a Riders on the Storm electric piano solo.

Bassist Patrick Scales opens Eight Cylinder with a tasty rumble underneath the brightly pouncing horns, the song shifting further into funk, dipping and rising again with tight solos from alto sax and trumpet, to a torrential coda from Bublath. The simply titled Gospel Song has one of the album’s most imaginative charts, a surreal blend of slow, summery bluesiness and orchestral heft, Kuroda contributing bubbly lyricism.

Home Cooking is a Meters-style soul strut with a defiantly allusive baritone sax solo and a wryly hazy, halfspeed psychedelic interlude where all the textures get woozy. Bublath switches to piano, then glittery, reverbtoned Rhodes in the brassy salsa-jazz number Return the Source

Guitarist Ferdinand Kirner’s spare chicken-scratch lines contrast with the orchestral grandeur in Dump the Goose as the horns tease out a New Orleans melody and the bandleader sails around. Sad Belt is moodier but no less funky and majestic as Bublath takes the music into sunnier terrain, with hints of gospel and a series of bracing tradeoffs between the organ and various parts of the ensemble.

The most straight-up funky number here is Mister Scales, spiced with an ebulliently bluesy guitar solo. The album’s biggest New Orleans funk homage is Outro Blow. They close with Bolero, which is a lot closer to Stan Getz’s adventures in Brazilian music than it is anything particularly Spanish.

Pushing beyond both the confines of the organ jazz and big band demimondes, this is a very entertaining project from a group that also includes trumpeters Nemanja Jovanovich, Florian Jechlinger, Reinhard Greiner and Andreas Unterrainer; saxophonists Ulrich Wangenheim, Florian Riedl, Alexander Kuhn, Moritz Stahl and Gregor Burger; trombonists Jürgen Neudert, Hans Heiner Bettinger, Erwin Gregg and Jakob Grimm, and drummer Christian Lettner.