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| Liner
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| By
Arno Victor Nielsen, Danish philosopher |
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| The giraffe
was the favourite animal of the French Surrealists.
You can´t see a giraffe without smiling
The giraffe is an emblem of the infinite absurdity
of existence. Children all over the world
know innumerable stories about how it got
its long neck. The giraffe is so grotesque
and meaningless that we have to find an explanation,
knowing full well that we will never find
the definitive one. And that is what is so
liberating about the animal. The giraffe is
a crux for thinking. It doesn´t observe
any of the rules of beauty and harmony, yet
no one would dream of calling the animal ugly. |
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| When we are
confronted with the giraffe, all our notions
af function and beauty break down. Of course,
anyone can see that the animal is perfectly
designed for living on the African savannah
and eating the leaves off trees. But why does
it have ti look like an ostrich on four legs?
A giraffe looks like no other animal and yet
it is a bricolage of other animals. On its
head it has antlers - sometimes as many as
five. The tail comes from an ox, the fur is
a panther´s. The eyes - oh, those big
eyes! It must have got them from a large,
beautiful bird. |
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| In an encyclopaedia
you can read that the giraffe is unusual,
striking, peculiar, strange, immense. In short,
the giraffe puts us in a state of happy, liberating
wonder. If the giraffe is real, anything is
possible. |
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| The giraffe
purges the eyes the way Pierre Dørge´s
New Jungle Orchestra wants to purges the ears.
Their music too hangs together not because
of, but in defiance of all good sense. Just
as the giraffe is composed of lots of other
animals in the most surprising way, the New
Jungle Orchestra´s music is composed
of rythms, keys, styles and themes from several
continents and from the history of music.
In the jazz context, instruments as different
and strange as the cello and the tarogato
increase the "alienation effect".
The music is at once wholly original and yet
so familiar. And when you hear it, you can
only smile. |
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| Julius Caesar
brought the giraffe to Europe. Pierre Dørge
and his New Jungle Orchestra have brought
"World Music" to Denmark and spread
it all over the world again. This year (1998)
the orchestra turns 18 and thus reaches the
age of majority according to Danish law. The
orchestra has grown up, become more retrospective
and perhaps less dadaistic. The tight opening
number Stranger Than Jim is dedicated to the
film director Jim Jarmusch, but is also a
nod to Ellington, who along with Ornette Coleman
is one of the Orchestra´s two mentors.
Coleman´s Lonely Woman is also quoted
here in a vocal version. In the title number
Giraf and not least in Hawk Meets Sun Ra we
feel transported to good old New Orleans.
The freer the jazz is, the more enthusiastically
it seems to confirm its roots. |
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| For me, Abe
teyata, which is Mandingo and means "it
is good" contains the essence of the
New Jungle Orchestra´s version of World
Music. There is no cult of ethnic here. Everything
is transformed into raw material for the free
expression of the members of the Orchestra.
And into fuel in a music machine that is also
a time machine. We begin in Africa and after
a trip to Sweden we are back in Africa, where
the jungle drums sound exactly as in the Tarzan
films |
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| The through-composed
De Fructa Oris was inspired by Henry Purcell
(1659-1695), while To You S.A. was inspired
by the lifeless voice in the telephone thet
tells you that you have the wrong number.
Nothing is too low, and nothing is too high
to be used as building material in the Orchestra´s
unpretentious, cheeky, genetic engineering
of music. And the result is musical mood pictures
that range from a Persian market in Lullaby
for Tchicai to the heart-rendingly beautiful
lament in Song for the Swan by and for the
composer and friend of the orchestra Helmer
Nørgaard, who died this year. |
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