Background: The aptly-named Cinematic Orchestra (TCO) were formed by Jason (J.) Swinscoe (born 1972) back in 1999.
At the time TCO started, J. was still an employee at Ninja Tune in South London, where he was responsible for export sales at the long-standing independent record label. Swinscoe arrived at London Bridge from Scotland via Yorkshire and Cardiff with a background playing bass and guitar in bands and DJing. Swinscoe first started to play around with sound at the age of 8, learning to play guitar. He formed his first group Crabladder, in 1990 as an art student (BA) at Cardiff College. In those days, Jason was very much in the conceptual work of the 60's and 70's, but also contemporary concepts, sculptures and paintings. Crabladder, spawned from 3 musicians, was experimenting with rhythm based sound/music, heavily influenced by jazz and American hardcore (No Means No, Jello Biafra, etc). In 1993 their first single was released on their own label 'Power Tools', soon after this release the band split, the reason being musical differences. Crabladder's fusion of jazz and hardcore punk elements with experimental rhythms inspired Swinscoe to further explore the poss. He began to focus on sampled based sound/rhythm. About Crabladder, Swinscoe now says "It was not my music."

In 1994 and 95, Jason was djing weekly on Heart FM, a pirate radio station based in South London, and also djing in various clubs around the UK and abroad (Moscow and St-Petersburg in Russia). Jason also set up, with other colleagues, a club called 'Loop' (London). The concept for this club is for the musicians and DJs to re-make the soundtrack to a film of their choice. This film will be projected while the DJs play new and already-existing music, knitting in snatches of dialogue and sound from the original. Guest producers are invited to play as well as live acts. DJs such as Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and Demus (2 Banks of 4), have been quick to take up the challenge of the format.

Motion: Taking on the role of bandleader, Swinscoe rallied a group of adventurous jazz players and delivered a debut album that took everyone by surprise and was voted album of the year by listeners to Gilles Peterson’s Radio One show. Peterson called it "one of the best record I've heard in ages". Swinscoe produced exclusive jingles for Giles Petersons' World Wide radio show. Motion is a record which emphasizes the ‘cinematic’ in the Cinematic Orchestra, with Uncut likening it to "every hard-boiled, neon-lit Hollywood thriller you’ve seen, the sound of a thousand femmes fatales, doomed P.I.’s and bitter plot twists remixed and refashioned in one ingeniously sampled audio narrative".

The recording of Motion started in 1997, starting with a computer and a sampler. Later live musicians were added, first of all Phil France (bass), then Tom Chant (sax). With this material Jason went into the studio and made a backing track and then slowly added more musicians and instruments. This process took more than a year. The new musicians were drummer Daniel Howard, turntableman Patrick Carpenter (aka PC from DJ Food), Jamie Coleman (trumpet) and Alex James (piano).

Live: In the three years after the release of Every Day, the Cinematics’ have played far and wide at every conceivable type of venue and on all kinds of occasion. They have shocked out from the Jazz Café to the Jazz Bop via Ronnie Scott’s. And in somewhat hardcore fashion they toured the North American Jazz Festival circuit in the back of a transit van, with the dates culminating in a prestigious support slot for John McLaughlin in Central Park.
They have toured in Germany, Japan, Italy and Portugal. They have also clocked up the music festival mileage appearing at, amongst others, Homelands and Essential (UK), Sonar (Spain), Celerico De Basto (Portugal), North Sea Jazz and Drum Rhythm (Holland), Cannes (France), Fuji Rock (Japan) and Montreux (Switzerland) and have headlined The Big Chill twice. Other live highlights include playing at the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award for Stanley Kubrick by the Directors Guild. About this, Swinscoe told later: "It all sounds quite grand, but truth was we were just the musical accompaniment for the evening before the meal and the award ceremonies. We were just playing tracks from our first album and, um, scaring people."
The single Horizon, which did not appear on ‘Every Day’, featured feisty 24 year old Niara Scarlett who had been touring with the band over the last year. Niara is also a successful songwriter in her own right with her credits including the Pop Stars: The Rivals ‘Sound Of The Underground’ single.
Jason and PC (DJ Food) also worked together under the name Neptune. The track 'Soul Pride' was released on a Ninja Tune compilation. On a Solid Steel session another track was played, but after that nothing more has been released.

Man With A Movie Camera: Suitably enough for a group who have become something of a household name in Portugal, Swinscoe and co. were commissioned to write and perform a new score for Dziga Vertov’s avant garde 1929 silent film Man With The Movie Camera, as the opening event celebrating the northern Portuguese city of Porto’s year as European City of Culture for 2001.
As a big fan of film soundtracks, Jay set about the mission with great enthusiasm. Following some frenzied rehearsals somewhere in South East London, the band performed Swinscoe’s soundtrack live in Porto’s splendid Coliseu theatre in May 2000 in front of an audience of 3500 and received a tumultuous ten minute standing ovation for their troubles.
In November 2002, Swinscoe was fortunate enough to come by some downtime at legendary specialist soundtrack studio, Whitfield Street in London. Over two days the Cinematics, along with a string section and percussionist Milo Fell, laid down what Swinscoe and France hope will be their definitive version of the soundtrack. This was released with the movie on DVD by Ninja Tune in the spring of 2003.

Travel: In 2004, Swinscoe relocated to Paris, which slightly altered the balance of work between himself and France during the making of Ma Fleur (and was also responsible for its French title).Then in 2006 he moved again, this time to Brooklyn, New- York (USA).
Jason is the first to acknowledge that this has had a direct impact on his creativity: “I think the cities I’ve lived in have had an effect on my perspective both personally and musically. The dynamics of a city changes the energy and pace of all things, but particularly music.”

Ma Fleur: In Paris, Jason began work on the instrumentals, which would form the basis of his new record. Having completed a rough version by early 2005, he gave this to a friend who disappeared for 3 weeks and came back with short story scripts in which each track represented a scene. This friend is Gavin McGrath, an advertising art director who had studied art in Cardiff with Swinscoe.
Jason then took this script and worked some more on the tracks, and in turn gave this back to his scriptwriter, the two aspects of the project developing alongside one another. This yet-to-be-made movie gave Jason the emotional and narrative impetus he needed to develop the pieces and, in particular, led him even further into his exploration of song than he had previously gone. “For me, I think it became a natural evolution to enquire into that whole new world of the song form,” he says. “Also I think the ‘sceenplay’ experiment led to a need for a much more direct relationship to words and stories. So it still has links with film and narrative, in fact was driven by it. For instance: with a plot in mind, I set to work on writing lyrics with a range of vocalists. In contrast to past heavily instrumental releases, there are six vocal cuts on ‘Ma Fleur’. The songwriting box was one I definitely wanted ticked with this record,” he admits. The drums have been completely stripped away, with the main focus on melody and harmony. Subsequently the Cinematic sound has shifted away from the dance scene and finds closer affinity with folk music. “Everything surrounding me in contemporary music was drum led,” Jason complains. “I wanted to disassociate myself with the club environment. A simple way was to get rid of the drums and find other ways to suggest and represent rhythm.”
Summarised in the opening track ‘To Build A Home’, ‘Ma Fleur’ is a simple story that deals with common rites of passage and human emotions. “It’s nothing ground-breaking,” says Jason. “It’s a love story based on three or four characters. I thought maybe this is too pretentious or cheesy, but we started to tie in some sub-plots and it worked.”
As yet there are no plans to make a movie version of the album. Instead Jason has chosen to represent the script with a series of photographs. “I needed to find a way of getting the idea of the record across without including the script in the CD booklet,” he explains. “So I decided on a series of empty peopleless location shots to tie down certain scenes.” With the help of the photographer Maya Hayuk, whose credits include The Beatsie Boys and Prefuse 73, Jason scouted 11 locations in New York. Each shot applies to a certain track, but none are labeled implicitly. “We spent four days digging out spots in Brooklyn (where Jason now lives). New York is an amazing playground, you can see why so many films are made there.”
It would have been tempting to retell the story through song lyrics, but for Jason it was important to keep the plot vague. “I wanted to keep it as open as possible,” he says. “Otherwise it would kill it.” By allowing the listener to draw their own conclusions, Jason hands over ownership of the song. This degree of universality is, in his opinion, at the core of good songwriting. It certainly accounts for the latent power of ‘Ma Fleur’, Cinematic’s most accomplished work to date. “Why define a story that doesn’t need to be told?” he concludes. “It’s a story that’s there for everybody to write themselves.”

The Current Band (2007): Over the years, the membership of Cinematic Orchestra has gradually evolved. Alongside core members Swinscoe and Phil France is Tom Chant, a fixture at left of centre jazz gigs all over the world, saxophonist Chant is known as one of the UK’s top free jazz players. For ‘Every Day’ young drumming legend Luke Flowers was recruited, who had played together with France for a number of years as youthful stars on the northern jazz circuit. New members for the current incarnation of TCO are Nick Ramm - a pianist from London who has played with Matthew Herbert amongst many others – and Stuart McCallum, a guitarist from Manchester, whose subtle, six string antics have slightly changed the dynamics of TCO’s sound on their new record.

Crimson Wings: the year 2008 was a big year for the band. As they toured all over the world, they were also working on a soundtrack for the Disney Nature film 'Crimson Wings'. Working with well known filmmusic producers and composers, they recorded 12 new tracks. They recorded the tracks with the London Metropolitan Orchestra. The soundtrack was released at the end of 2008.