Universal Syncopations II is the sequel Miroslav Vitous released on ECM in 2007, four years after the first Universal Syncopations. The first had brought him together with John McLaughlin and Chick Corea, and none of that cast returns. The Czech musician, the original bassist of Weather Report, takes a very different route here. A small jazz ensemble with his double bass at its centre is surrounded by orchestral and choral sound that he composed, arranged and directed himself.
The music was recorded between November 2004 and April 2005 at Universal Syncopations Studios in Clavesana, Italy, and Vitous produced it. Instead of an all-star studio band, a small core group is expanded by chosen soloists, and the line-up changes from track to track. Trumpeter Randy Brecker and saxophonist Bob Mintzer play on Opera and Gmoong. Gary Campbell plays soprano and tenor saxophone, and Gerald Cleaver is the drummer on most pieces, with others joining on single tracks. The orchestral colours come from Vitous's own archive of symphonic samples, a library he first issued in 1992.
The opening Opera, over eleven minutes long, announces the change. Voices drift in and out, and the piece then settles into a groove under Mintzer's saxophone, set against an otherworldly orchestral backdrop and the leader's virtuoso bass. Breakthrough puts Campbell's soprano in front of what Stuart Nicholson in Jazzwise heard as a marriage of jazz and symphonic sound. In Echoes, Kevin Le Gendre described the ensemble as a steady bobbin around which the orchestra and choir are woven, in textures that keep interweaving and unravelling. The album ends with the short Moment, where Vitous adds a singing bowl and the voice of Vesna Vaško-Cáceres.
ECM lists the album among the annual prizes (Jahrespreis) of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik for 2007. In The Times, John Bungey wrote that its impressionistic music, with strings and voices threading through the mix, "sometimes recalls early Weather Report". Phil Johnson in the Independent on Sunday found it "rather relentless and not easy listening", but credited Vitous with making jazz sound new.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2013, first released in June 2007.
