1982 · Album
Cityscape
Recorded 1982 · Warner Bros. Records · Produced by Tommy LiPuma
Jazz and Strings Find Common Ground
Brecker's improvisations grow naturally out of the orchestral background, making the jazz-classical divide feel almost irrelevant.
Cityscape wraps Michael Brecker's saxophone in lush orchestral arrangements that never feel like a cage. Claus Ogerman conducts with restraint—the strings swell and recede, giving Brecker room to breathe and spin out his lines over harmonies that belong to neither pure jazz nor classical music, but somewhere between. The textures are warm and urbane, the pace unhurried. You hear standards and originals rendered with real sophistication, each track a small world unto itself.
What makes this work is how naturally the crossover happens. Brecker doesn't fight the orchestra or show off against it. Instead, his solos seem to emerge from the harmonies themselves, as if the strings wrote the path and he's just following it deeper. AllMusic reviewer James Manhill called it one of Ogerman's most successful works precisely because there's enough overlap between jazz harmony and late Romantic chromaticism that the two worlds feel compatible rather than forced. The title track and "In the Presence and Absence of Each Other" are the centerpieces—the latter earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Composition.
For Brecker, this sits apart from his electric fusion work and his later acoustic records. It's a poised, chamber-like statement, showing he was already thinking beyond the jazz-rock identity he'd built with Herbie Hancock and others. If you want to hear him in a completely different setting, operating at the peak of his lyricism, this is the place.
Who's playing
Eddie Gomezbass
Marcus Millerbass
John Tropeaguitar
Buzz Feitenguitar
Michael Breckertenor saxophone
Steve Gadddrums
Paulinho da Costapercussion
Warren Bernhardtkeyboard
Where next?
More by Michael Brecker
All 29 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
