Manteca
Biographie Manteca
Manteca
The Jazz World Orchestra Manteca has sold over 100,000 records around the world and shared stages with Miles Davis, Ella, Van Morrison and many others, from the Hollywood Bowl to the North Sea Jazz Festival. Manteca is one of Canada's best-known and original instrumental artists. The band's 11th recording Monday Night at the Mensa Disco will be released on September 17th.
Melodic, powerful and fresh, this 7-song studio recording written by band leaders Doug Wilde and Matt Zimbel is at once joyous and muscular. With melodies often helmed by instruments considered off the beaten path of jazz such as bass clarinet and alto flute, the tracks are under pinned by deep skin on skin grooves of hand drums and grounded by kit, acoustic piano and bass.
Recorded at Toronto's remarkable Revolution Recordings by 4-time Juno award winning engineer Jeff Wolpert the album sonics are larger than life.
The Mensa Disco is where the intellectuals gather to dance, it's where the time signatures are odd and so are the clients. It's where the doorman, (himself a PhD in the Advanced Behavioural Theory of Drunks) says, 'yeah, I can let you in but I'm going to have to see some IQ.'
In 34 years of playing and recording they've been called an institution. the legendary.jazz royalty.The reality is Manteca is new world jazz for the new world .a nine member artist collective based in Toronto that has created a unique and enduring highly original sound with building blocks from jazz, world, funk, folk and contemporary orchestral music.
"We are driven," says leader Matt Zimbel, "by an intense desire to see the thrill in our audience's eyes. With nine players on stage when we play an ensemble figure together there is a power and this kind of joyous impact surrounded by the silence between the notes that exhilarates us and in turn the audience. Show after show, it's the look in their eyes and the fact that we keep hearing people say the same thing after the show, 'wow, I wasn't expecting that!' Now that is remarkably motivating."
Manteca has been a finalist for the Juno Award for Best Original Jazz Album three times and won the Juno for best instrumental once. The band's extensive archives have been collected by the National Library of Canada and their recordings have been released around the world, with numerous releases in the Unites States, Germany, South Africa and Asia. Critics have consistently praised their appearances and recordings as "innovative, unique and exhilarating".
In 2007 after a hiatus, the band returned with their 9th album "Onward" which was nominated for two Juno Awards, one for original Jazz recording and one for engineering for the band's long time engineer, Jeff Wolpert. "Onward" marked a shift in direction as the band created a fresh voice by introducing bass clarinet, alto flute, trombone, string bass and a rhythmic direction based less in Latin percussion and more on what the three drummers call "the sonic bubble".
