Beats & Pieces Big Band give lie to the notion big band music is an obsolete format, a relic from decades of yore, founded in 2008 and directed by conductor, composer, arranger, and producer Ben Cottrell this ensemble swings, twenty-first century style.

With Good Days, their long-awaited third studio album, they show once again that big band music is a living, expressive thing, more than capable of continuing development in our own times. Put simply, there are things a big band say and do that cannot otherwise be said and done, and Beats & Pieces say and do plenty here, with exhilarating immaculacy and imagination.

Good Days ranges emotionally from the funereal to the exuberant, the ecclesiastical to the profane, the pacific to the chaotic. Fleetingly, you think of Charles Mingus, Keith Tippett, Gil Evans, Charlie Hadens Liberation Orchestra... But theres also a post-rock undertow to many of these tracks which shows a consciousness of such contemporaries as Bjrk, Radiohead, or Everything Everything.