John Sangster's The Lord of the Rings, Vols. 1-3

A study of John Sangster's jazz suite Lord of the Ringscontextualized with biographical and cultural studies of the composer in the 1970s.

At more than 6 LP recordings, the Lord of the Ringssuite, produced during the 1970s, based on the Tolkien books, is the most ambitious, stylistically and emotionally wide-ranging compositional oeuvre ever undertaken in Australian jazz. Its composer (and one of its performers) John Sangster, followed a career from the late 1940s to his death in 1995 that spanned the entire historical spectrum of jazz styles from traditional to the avant-garde, through performance, recording and film/TV music. One of the most complex figures in Australian music, in both temperament and musical style, he straddled the full spectrum from light to darkness, idolized by his colleagues, yet capable of evoking the most extreme violence. Nothing in the recording history of Australian jazz, and perhaps Australian music in general, matches the monumental stature of this suite, which he called his musical autobiography.