Brian Carpenter's Ghost Train Orchestra

Brian Carpenter is fascinated with jazz before it began to swing—the early music that made its way up the riverboat lines and the railroads from New Orleans to the big Northern cities of Chicago and New York. Carpenter is an eclectic postmodernist who has recorded elsewhere in alt-country and alt-rock contexts. With the Ghost Train Orchestra, he takes a wild ride down to the cotton clubs of yore, resuscitating the brassy, exuberant sound of fiercely rhythmic combos from the years before even the spelling of jazz (“jass”?) had been decided. The 12 numbers on Hothouse Stomp are half-crazy songs from obscure orchestras of the era in which imaginative arrangements stir a little free jazz and klezmer into the hot jazz.