Jazz Reviews : Penguin Orchestra

There’s no denying the oddness of the name--the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Nor is there any question about leader and chief composer Simon Jeffes’ fascinating range of credentials. He has collaborated with everyone from Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols to Twyla Tharp and Andre Gregory.

So the group’s arrival Saturday night at the Japan America Theater as part of the UK/LA ’88 Festival seemed to promise an eclectic listening experience.

It soon became apparent, however, that the seven-piece English ensemble--consisting of piano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, bass and guitar, with considerable doubling of other instruments--has devoted itself to the somewhat quixotic task of blending minimalist repetitions with bits and pieces of various ethnic musics.

Unlike, say, Paul Simon’s passionate embrace of African pop music, however, the Penguin Orchestra’s relationship with some of its source music has the detached air of dissident preciosity.

Listening to its prim interpretations of an African folk melody called “Cutting Branches . . .,” an Irish jig-styled Jeffes original titled “Music for a Found Harmonium” and a quasi-bluegrass “Beanfields,” called up the vision of an English past--of returned colonials sitting around a drawing room politely offering their versions of the wild and woolly musics of the Empire.

Other pieces--”Isle of View” was typical--wandered down the garden path of New Age rambling. “Numbers 1 to 4” and “White Mischief” were like atmospheric film cues designed to be part of an anonymous background texture. And “Surface Tension/Oscar Tango” was filled with such melodramatic seriousness that one kept hoping for it to break out in Monty Python satire.

Alas, such was not the case. The promise of whimsical eclecticism suggested by the Penguin Orchestra’s name and Jeffes’ credentials remained nothing more than an illusion.