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At 80, Westbrook in tune with the modern world
Chris Searle on jazz

Mike Westbrook and the Uncommon Orchestra
A Bigger Show
(ASC Records, CD162-163)

In their new double album, A Bigger Show, Mike and Kate Westbrook together with the 20-piece Uncommon Orchestra introduce us to all the propositions, juxtapositions and contradictions of the “showground of life,” a sonic venue of our planet where “Hot-shot cash-back with steady-growth gilt-edge must lie/ Self-absorption will with free choice and knowledge grope and sigh.”

It is our 21st-century world in miniature, a “waxeywork show” of the grotesque and the beautiful, the tender and the brutal, all sparking from this “jazz-rock oratorio.”

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