Jiri Slavik - La Jeunesse

La Jeunesse is an album of Jiri Slavik's compositions for large ensemble, where jazz sounds are put in a chamber music setting.La Jeunesse is Jiri Slavik's debut album as a composer and a conductor. At its origin lies an idea to assemble a large ensemble of young London and Paris jazz musicians and put them in a strict chamber music setting, where nothing is improvised. Since all the notes are written, the music can deeply explore principles of counterpoint and give each musician the chance to be a soloist as well as a team player. The band includes some of the top names from the British scene such as Alex Bonney, Jim Hart, Tom Challenger and Zhenya Strigalev.Thanks to the multicultural background of the album's participants, La Jeunesse touches upon pre-existent genres that have been assembled over years of living abroad in different cultures and synthesizes them into a shape of its own invention. The main detectable influences evoke the work of personalities such as Duke Ellington, Igor Stravinsky, Kurt Weil, George Russell, Glenn Gould, The Beatles or even Radiohead, all the way to the music of J. S. Bach. As the title suggests (La Jeunesse meaning Youth), this music is altogether juvenile � full of exaggeration, overstatements, clich�s, carelessness, but also of spontaneity, humour, or a particular sense of worry that arises through entering another chapter in life.