If you’re looking for something beyond the Great American Songbook for inspiration, come back a few hundred years to the days of King Arthur with Logan Strosahl and his band. Strosahl plays alto sax and composes the pieces along with narrating the stories along with Julia Easterlin about the “knights of old” with Michael Sachs/cl, Sam Decker/ts, Aquiles Navarro/tp, Nick Sanders/p, Connor Baker/dr and Henry Fraser/b.
The music itself has rich horns forming processional marches as on “Proof: The Round Table” and “”Wherein the Beast is Ever More and More,” yet with a left of center freedom as the horns veer outside and in. Sachs’ clarinet gets klezmatic on the herky jerky “The Woods So Wild” while teaming melodically with Sanders on “”Turn Thou Us.” Easterlin tells her story through noir-ish horns on the pulsating journey of “Igraine Gives the Infant Arthur to Ector” and delivers a speech on the wild form of Renaissance reeds during the staccato’d “Battle of Bedegraine.” Almost like a fitting soundtrack to Monty Python’s Holy Grail film.