2.jpg)
1.jpg)
1-1313417092.jpg)
Apr 4th 2014
Durham, NC USA
IMN - International Music Network
The Ghost Train Orchestra was founded in 2006 by composer Brian Carpenter. That year Carpenter was hired as the musical director for Voltaic Vaudeville, an event marking the 90th anniversary of the historic Regent Theater in Arlington, MA. He selected five composers from a transitional time and place in America: the late 1920s Chicago and Harlem, when the jazz orchestra was being developed by bandleaders such as Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Tiny Parham, Fess Williams, and Charlie Johnson. Carpenter began transcribing the parts from old 78s and arranged the music for a 9-piece ensemble to back performers on stage. The reaction to the band’s debut at the Regent Theater was tremendous, and since then the band has performed regularly in New York City, home of all its members except the leader, a Boston resident.
In 2008, Carpenter arranged the music with added strings, voice, and musical saw, and the following year recorded the band in New York City at Avatar Studios with engineer/producer Danny Blume. The result of this work accumulated in Hothouse Stomp, released on Accurate Records in 2011. The album achieved much critical acclaim, making several year-end best-of lists, and reaching the top 10 of the Billboard Jazz charts. The band has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC, the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
The Ghost Train Orchestra is currently developing music in New York City for their second album, featuring wild new arrangements of “chamber jazz” from the mid-to-late 1930s from bandleaders John Kirby, Reginald Foresythe, Raymond Scott and Alec Wilder. The Ghost Train Orchestra will be performing live on tour in the Northeast and beyond in 2012.
Brian Carpenter is a composer, arranger, filmmaker, producer, engineer, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He is the trumpeter, arranger, and founder of the Ghost Train Orchestra. In 2002, he founded the Boston-based band Beat Circus, for which he has composed a “Weird American Gothic” trilogy of original music. In 2010, his Southern Gothic opus “Boy From Black Mountain” won the Independent Music Award for Best Alt/Country Album. He is also the lead singer and songwriter of the Boston-based alternative rock band Brian Carpenter & The Confessions, founded in 2010. Carpenter has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He has collaborated or recorded with Michael Gira, Swans, Larkin Grimm, Brian Dewan, Marc Ribot, and Roswell Rudd. He is also the director of two films currently in production, including a feature-length documentary on the life and legacy of Albert Ayler, on which he collaborated with many artists, including guitarist Marc Ribot, avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow, trombonist Roswell Rudd, and comic strip writer Harvey Pekar.
Subscribe to the News RSS Feed for Ghost Train Orchestra
Subscribe to the Tourdates RSS Feed for Ghost Train Orchestra
| Hot Tempered Blues | 4:09 | Ghost Train Orchestra |
| Voodoo | 3:04 | Ghost Train Orchestra |
| Stop Kidding | 2:32 | Ghost Train Orchestra |
A trip through 1920s Chicago and Harlem…Carpenter selected, transcribed, arranged, and conducted tunes made semi-famous by bands that have faded into semi-obscurity…one must stop and remind oneself: This crazy-beautiful living-history lesson sprang from Brian Carpenter’s mind. Wow.
The Boston Globe
Live, the nine-piece band was a reminder of how wild and carnivalesque that old-time music really is, and how satisfying the swing impulse remains amid all the wheel reinvention.
A Blog Supreme
It’s music with grit to it, with drive and raw energy. It’s delightfully familiar, too — or is it? With quirky little arrangements, plus Carpenter’s additions of strings and musical saw (responsible for the “voodoo” effect heard here) there are plenty of delights for the close listener.
All Things Considered
Carpenter leads a suberb band of New York-based vanguardists and while most of the solos ditch period authenticity and employ a vocabulary that contains ideas from the next 90 years of jazz history, his sharp arrangements retain the contrapuntal flash, sweet voicings, and fiery rhythms of the original era.
DownBeat
This is music from the heart of the Jazz Age that still has a raucous immediacy. In fact, just about every track on the band’s Hothouse Stomp (Accurate) has the hookiness of a pop hit.
The Boston Phoenix
