As an avant-garde artist shifting between New York, London and Tokyo, Ono’s work blended performance and conceptual art with feminism. Take her notorious “Cut Piece,” by which she provided scissors, and her clothed physique, to a sadistic viewers with a single instruction—cut. It’s simply as unflinching is Season of Glass, a pop requiem to her slain husband John Lennon.
This one is harking again to a number of the nice “cool jazz” orchestras of the late 1940s or ‘50s, echoes of Claude Thornhill or Sauter-Finegan imbuing its construction and outer garb; even the alto saxophone solo by Marc Phaneuf has echoes of Charlie Mariano or Sonny Stitt. In some ways, this is a actual old-school massive band ballad, and here Sanford appropriately retains his penchant for harmonic audacity beneath wraps. He does, nevertheless, suddenly let the trumpet section explode in a single passage before bringing the quantity back down. Of …