Download: Watts Ensemble “Suite for Crime: Funny Cigarettes”

(from Crime & Time out now on Kill Shaman)

Jazz arkestra Watts Ensemble’s Crime & Time introduces itself with a ringing in your ears not unlike a gentler version of post-concert hearing loss—either as a disclaimer or an aural warm-up to the 13 musicians and 18 or so instruments they play (which grace the album cover in a stylish Blue Note-esque portrait) all about to drop in on your party with the most delicious 31-layer dip that you’ve ever tasted. In the aforementioned “Suite for Crime: Good Morning,” the staccato grated-cheese ringing gives way to squelchy piano and brass melodies unified by crisp drumming and a lilting woodwind tune. In “Suite for Time: Winter,” a lone piano drips onto the track—on the verge of snapping as you watch, brow wrinkled in suspense and lightly beaded with sweat. “Suite for Crime: Train to Algeria” could be the score to a silent Agatha Christie-James Bond filmic partnership. “Suite for Crime” on the whole sounds shifty enough to deserve its title, and the evocative mutations of both suites together could easily land the Ensemble a regular gig scoring anything from Busby Berkeley films to episodes of Entourage to animated epics. Fantasia 2010, anyone? Or you can just use the album as your own personal biopic score as appropriate. You doing the crime or the time?

—Ayse Arf