page_title: Stan Kenton Plays Chicago
section_title: Composition
hierarchical_section_title: Stan Kenton Plays Chicago / Music / Composition
caption_attribution_description: English: Bob Curnow &amp; Stan Kenton, 1974 Universal Studios - Chicago album
context_page_description: Stan Kenton Plays Chicago is a studio album by American jazz musician Stan Kenton and his orchestra, released on August 17, 1974, by Creative World Records. Recording sessions for the album took place in Chicago on June 4, 5, 6, 1974. The sessions are entirely based on the music of modern rock n' roll groups, in contrast to Kenton's earlier work which primarily featured swing with some progressive jazz leanings.
  The album's influence on future large ensemble jazz composition and arranging has led more recent critiques to acknowledge it as the most influential album of the later Kenton orchestras and of the 1970s. The album is a class production, and musically the most successful of all the attempts to interpret the Kenton style in contemporary terms.
context_section_description: Stan Kenton Plays Chicago is based on the music of the rock groups Chicago and Blood, Sweat, and Tears with two original works from Robert Curnow which are added very late in the development of the project.
  
  The Chicago III Suite was a complicated work of music and the band only played it for a couple of months after the sessions. Kenton himself would get lost in the conducting during the piece and too many musical details would get missed.  On the recording session itself Curnow would be the conductor for this, as were most of the works recorded in the 1970s conducted be the arrangers themselves.
  Dick Shearer makes commentary on the quality of the Blood, Sweat, and Tears portion of the album, "(Alone is) a classic, what Curnow did with that, with the swing chorus in the middle. And "Inner Crisis" on the original record is a piano solo at the beginning, and just listen to how Curnow re-orchestrated that for the full band."
caption: Bob Curnow & Stan Kenton
  Universal Studios, Chicago, Ill. June 1974
  Stan Kenton Plays Chicago sessions
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