PASBORG’S ODESSA X-TRA LARGE LIVE is drummer Stefan Pasborg’s third release with his “Odessa project”, alt-hough the constantly touring, widely travelled drummer has yet to visit the Ukrainian harbor city by the Black Sea. He stubbornly tries to keep his fantasies alive of the city as a fascinating melting pot of cultures, home to a diverse popu-lation of Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Rumanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Armenians, Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, hustlers, pirates and smugglers – truly a cosmo¬politan mixture. Pasborg envisions choirs, Russian military bands, parade bands and brass bands, Middle Eastern drums, traditional jazz, free improvisations, classical, rock, funk and much more – all seamlessly blending together. Naturally no existing band played the music, Pasborg heard in his head, so he assembled a group to fit the sound.
This time, the charismatic 38-year old musician has merged two of the bands with whom he has worked most intensively over the recent years: Odessa 5 and Ibrahim Electric. The result is a new version of Odessa X-tra Large, and the music is a natural continuation of the music on the two Stunt relea¬ses ODESSA FIVE from 2008 and ODESSA X-TRA LARGE from 2010.
It is not surprising that Pasborg’s Odessa is a popular live act – the remarkable band in its various formats has tou¬red Denmark and abroad since 2006 – because once you’ve experienced this wild group on stage, you will most probably have become a devoted fan. A tumultuous and wonderful encounter, the energetic, unimpressed and anarchistic inter¬pretations of known and unknown material are not your eve¬ryday listening. All this is crammed into ODESSA X-TRA LARGE LIVE, recorded at one concert at Copenhagen Jazz House and one at The Village studio in front an invited audience. Once again we can enjoy a wild, multi-ethnic vibe filtered through Pasborg’s twisted brain. His dynamic drum¬ming is the natural center in the joyous, controlled anarchy featuring music by Led Zeppelin, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, The Lounge Lizards, Jack White, Albert Ayler and Pasborg himself. Stefan Pasborg spans from avant-garde, working with many of Europe’s most important performers of the idiom – young and old – to more outward and assessable music with Ibrahim Electric, an extremely popular Danish organ trio with fans far beyond the ranks of jazz aficionados. The three-time Grammy-winning drummer is one of Europe’s most respected. Ever since his world famous uncle, drummer Alex Riel, gave him his first snare drum at the age of three, he has been more than normally active.
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