Vince Mendoza has had quite a long association with the WDR Big Band, dating back at least to the Vince Mendoza/Arif Mardin Project: Jazzpaña (ACT) in 1992 that was awarded the German Jazz Award and two Grammy nominations. Randy Brecker w/Mike Brecker – Some Skunk Funk (BHM) from 2005 and Joe Zawinul: Brown Street (BHM) from 2006 both used the WDR Big Band, each earning Mendoza a Grammy award for his arrangements. And although Blauklang (ACT), meaning ‘blue sound’, from 2008 was not with the WDR Big Band, it was at least produced by WDR's Bernd Hoffmann and recorded at the WDR Cologne Jazz Festival and must surely number among Mendoza's finest albums. His writing tends to avoid antiphony in the traditional big band sense, owing more to a lighter, fleet-footed style with highly mobile tone colours that are written across the sections – brass (trumpets and trombones) and saxes (from soprano, alto, tenor and baritone doubling woodwinds and flutes) that arranger Don Sebesky introduced on two albums released in 1984, Full Cycle and Moving Lines that quickly established the new norm in contemporary big band writing. These lighter, dancing lines are a feature of Mendoza's ‘Amazonas’ and ‘Daybreak’ that evoke Brazil, while on ‘Choros #3’ he reminds us of the importance of creating a memorable melody and being able to develop it. Perhaps the one thing that contemporary big band arrangers have not effectively solved is finding an effective balance between the written (the ensembles) and improvised (the solos). A solo that goes on too long can effectively slice a performance in half, blotting out the memory of the ensemble passages that preceded it and rendering inconsequential that which follows – something I have called the Toshiko Akyoshi effect. There's a bit of that going on here, which is a shame since Mendoza is one of the few contemporary arrangers today able to give rise to the notion that the composer/arranger can be as much a creative force in jazz as the soloist.