The Jazz Repertory Company Blog

The Jazz Repertory Company Blog
The Jazz Repertory Company Blog

Tuesday 25 April 2017

"TRULY SHOW-STOPPING" - The Golden Age Of British Big Bands Reviewed

REVIEW: Jazz Repertory Co. - The Golden Age of British Big Bands at Cadogan Hall

The Golden Age Big Band
Photo credit: Paul Wood

Jazz Repertory Co. - The Golden Age of British Big Bands 
(Cadogan Hall, 23 April 2017. Review by Peter Vacher)
 

Deep in the Leytonstone think-tank where the Jazz Repertory Company draw up their plans, great minds work tirelessly to devise new enterprises and projects, or as we know them, to create themed concerts designed to tickle the fancy of the Cadogan Hall’s happy band of faithful followers. 

The skills and ingenuity of team leaders Richard Pite and Pete Long are crucial to these endeavours, each concert like a new book whose pages have yet to be turned. That these two musical magpies continue to come up with cleverly devised, thoughtful programmes may well be one of the small wonders of the age. And that of course brings us to their latest outpouring devoted to British big bands which debuted last Sunday. 

Pete Long
Photo credit: Paul Wood

In a concert that lived up to the cliché of a game of two halves, the first took the largely populist route with the accent on vocal recollections, with everything from a George Formby favourite warbled by Spats Langham with ukulele accompaniment to a pair of duet s between the sweet-voiced Janice Day [who also had a neat solo turn on That Lovely Weekend] and Langham. All nicely done; even if the outstanding Pete Long orchestra was confined to playing second fiddle. No such caveat for Alex Garnett who took on the tenor role in the Coleman Hawkins/Jack Hylton version of Melancholy Baby with his usual creative tenacity, the band writing cleverly devised. Along the way, Fred Elizalde’s spirited 1928 chart for Crazy Rhythm had aged beautifully, with Jay Craig emulating Adrian Rollini on bass saxophone, followed by a rousing Harry Roy piece and then the climactic Bakerloo Non-Stop, from the days of Ted Heath, all brass and belligerence, with lead trumpeter Nathan Bray triumphant in the spotlight. 
Tom Spats Langham, I Told My Baby With My Ukulele
The Golden Age Of British Big Bands

With Heath’s Hot Toddy’/’Swinging Shepherd Blues post-interval again exploring the popular, Stan Tracey’s Afro Charlie Meets The White Rabbit then offered a bracing-eye’s view of the jazz uplands with Garnett heard at length and in supreme form, every nuance explored, each short phrase cooked to perfection. Tracey’s unlikely collaboration with Acker Bilk came good with Long’s mellifluous clarinet rendering of Stranger on the Shore before we again reverted to the hit parade with trombonist Chris Dean’s pair of truly show-stopping vocals recalling the heyday of Matt Monro. Jazz-free but superbly done. Back into the premiership with two pieces culled from the Tubby Hayes
big band pad; Parisian Thoroughfare giving trumpeter Freddie Gavita his chance to unwind a long, looping improvisation that had boppish élan as its trademark, before trumpeter Mark Armstrong [NYJO’s Musical Director] combined with Garnett on Suddenly Last Tuesday to provide the kind of heartening evidence that all was well on the jazz front. Brilliant chart, superbly executed, tremendous soloists.

Alec Dankworth
Photo credit: Paul Wood
Good, too to celebrate John Dankworth, especially since son Alec Dankworth was on bass, with the very catchy African Waltz and the cleverly-constructed Tomorrow’s World theme, this before a roaring tribute to NYJO itself with Bill Charleson’s demanding arrangement of My Old Man this allowing trombonist Callum Au to do some solo muscle flexing. Fast and furious, for sure.

The Golden Age Big Band
Photo credit: Paul Wood

THE BAND:


Pete Long [MD, cl, as]; Janice Day [voc]; Thomas Langham [voc/g]; Martin Litton [p]
Freddie Gavita, Nathan Bray, James Davison, Mark Armstrong [t, fgh];
Chris Dean [tb/voc]; Andy Flaxman, Callum Au [tb]; Mark Frost [b-tb];
Bob Sydor [ts, cl, f]; Alex Garnett [ts, cl, f]; Colin Skinner [as, cl, f, picc, sop]; Simon Marsh [as, cl, f]; Jay Craig [bs, cl, b-cl, bass-sax]
Alec Dankworth [b]; Richard Pite [d].
The Jazz Repertory Company
Something To Make A Noise About

Thursday 20 April 2017

“You know Glenn Miller, he did the music for World War Two” - The Golden Age Of British Big Bands


13 Countdowns To Our St George's Day Cadogan Hall Concert, 
The Golden Age Of British Big Bands, 23rd April, 7pm 2017.

Countdown #13: One night when the Ted Heath Band was sharing the bill with another big band, Johnny Hawkesworth was coming off stage carrying his bass.  As he passed the other bass player going on he leant over and said “watch the bowler at your end”.

Ted Heath: Swingin’ Shepherd Blues featured in The Golden Age of British Big Bands.

Countdown #12: A bandleader I used to work for always announced any Glenn Miller number by saying “You know Glenn Miller, he did the music for World War Two”.

Countdown #11: “Do you know the difference between a ukulele and a banjo?  A banjo takes longer to burn.” George Formby.
George Formby: I Told My Baby With My Ukulele featured in The Golden Age of British Big Bands

Countdown #10: Tom Langham sings George Formby's 1932 hit "I Told My Baby With My Ukulele."


Countdown #9: “I visited an Italian restaurant in New York which was run by the Mafia.  The house speciality was broken leg of lamb”  Ronnie Scott
Tubby Hayes Big Band:  Suddenly Last Tuesday featured in The GoldenAge of British Big Bands

Countdown #8: Clarinet players sometimes hold their reed against a coin and burn the top edge away to harden them.  A certain clarinet player turned to the pianist Bert Murray and asked if he’d got a 10p piece to burn his reed and Bert looked up saying  ‘Here’s a quid, burn the whole bloody clarinet”

Countdown #7: A well know band leader confessed to being paranoiac, IanChristie told him “No, you’ve got it wrong.  Paranoia is when you think people don’t like you.”
Harry Roy:  Milenberg Joys featured in The Golden Age of British BigBands.

Countdown #6: We stayed in a hotel the other night.  Talk about mean, he turned the gas off while she turned the bacon over and when we went in to breakfast we found the tomato ketchup on an optic”  Acker Bilk.

Countdown #5: “I’d now like to hand you back to the band.  Each man is a soloist in his own right – it’s only when they play together that they get into trouble”  Ronnie Scott
Tubby Hayes Big Band: Parisian Thoroughfare featured in The GoldenAge of British Big Bands

Countdown #4: Kenny Clare always played marvellous drum solos with my band.  I remember playing a firemen’s dance in Hull – a fireman came up to me saying Kenny’s drumming was absolutely fantastic,” but mind you, we’ve got a bloke who plays in a pub round the corner who’s even better” – John Dankworth

Countdown #3: The great drummer Phil Seaman was playing drums in the pit orchestra for West Side Story.  One night he nodded off to sleep during a quiet spot and fell off his stool and crashed into his big gong.  With great presence of mind, he stood up and announced “Dinner is Served” - Ronnie Scott
Tubby Hayes Big Band: Suddenly Last Tuesday featured in The Golden Age of British Big Bands.

Countdown #2: When the Stones drummer Charlie Watts appeared in the club with his enormous big band    Apart from Charlie there were two other drummers.  I remember hearing the band rehearse and at the end of one opus Charlie enquired if the tempo was OK.  To which a voice from the sax section said “Great.  I liked all three tempos”  Ronnie Scott

Countdown 1# Talking about putting new tunes on top of old chords.  I have just acquired an album of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra on which some bright young thing has taken the chords of “Thou Swell” and turned it into a bebop extravaganza called “Gynaecology”  Digby Fairweather
National Youth Jazz OrchestraMy Old Man Said Follow The Van featured in 













Sunday 2 April 2017

Bravo the British big band scene old and new: who said the golden age was over...Concert Preview

PREVIEW: The Golden Age of the British Big Bands, (Cadogan Hall, April 23rd)


Jack Hylton, Ted Heath, Tubby Hayes, John Dankworth...
All represented in The Golden Age of the British Big Bands at Cadogan Hall

The Jazz Repertory Company has a new show, "The Golden Age of the British Big Bands." The premiere is on St George's Day, April 23rd, at Cadogan Hall. The concert will present a programme selected from  a large repertoire and long tradition; the earliest arrangement is from 1928, the last from 1980. Peter Vacher explains this great heritage and the background to the concert. He writes: 

While we may accept, reluctantly perhaps, that the Golden Age of the big bands, British or American, is a thing of the past, it’s clear that the desire to play in a collective situation continues to exert its pull on jazz musicians, here and elsewhere. Consider the number of rehearsal big bands that exist up and down the United Kingdom, as well as the professional touring orchestras that re-create, say, the repertoire of Glenn Miller. The challenge of executing complex arrangements in an exciting fashion must be a source of great satisfaction to those who meet it: witness the many fine players who have been recruited by Richard Pite and Pete Long to perform for the Jazz Repertory Company’s concert series and the excellence of their achievements. 


 
On stage at Cadogan Hall for 
The Golden Age Of British Big Bands
 
This time, the challenge is even more considerable – how to replicate and re-energise music as varied as that performed by the Spanish-Filipino pianist Fred Elizalde and his band of US expatriates in London in 1928 and then by the concert’s end, to recall the smart-sounding innovations of John Dankworth in the 1960s? In thinking back to the Elizalde era, it’s perhaps timely given our impending exit from the European community to reflect on the welcome contributions of these overseas musicians, like the Americans, multi-instrumentalist Adrian Rollini and trumpeter Chelsea Quealey who settled here and enlivened Elizalde’s recordings and engagements. 

And then again it’s instructive to recall the periods spent in Britain by a number of the commanding figures in jazz when their presence helped to make between-the-wars London such a hot-bed of musical adventure. The great US tenor-saxophonist Coleman Hawkins appeared and toured with Jack Hylton’s band in the 1930s and it’s their version of ‘Melancholy Baby’ that is included in the Cadogan Hall programme. Benny Carter, too, was in town, arranging for the Henry Hall radio orchestra and pianist Fats Waller toured our variety theatres. How sad that the British Musicians Union’s desire to protect UK jobs should then have led them to ban American jazz musicians from working here for the next 20 years or so, thus depriving local musicians and British audiences of the chance to hear the world’s greatest players in their prime. 

On stage at Cadogan Hall for 
The Golden Age Of British Big Bands
Bands like those led by Hylton, Ray Noble and Ambrose had already earned their popularity by appearing at top hotels and night-clubs where the glitterati of the day would dance the night away, never giving a fig for any putative jazz talent that might or might not adorn their bandstands. They just wanted a good time and these bandleaders saw to it they had just that, adding to their fame with radio-hook-ups and many recordings. These leaders were the ‘celebrities’ of their day, courted and feted by the elite. Another such band and an unusual one at that was led by Guyana-born dancer Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and consisted of the very best West Indian players then resident in London. Their break- through engagement was at the Café de Paris but sadly their triumph was short-lived for Johnson was killed outright when a German bomb hit the Café mid-performance on 8 March 1941. It’s their version of ‘It Was a Lover And His Lass’ that adorns the programme with Spats Langham recalling the mellifluous tones of vocalist Al Bowlly, another whose career was so sadly truncated when he too was killed in a WW2 air-raid just two months after Johnson. Fittingly for a St George’s Day concert the words are by our national playwright, William Shakespeare. 

Easily the most prominent big band of the 1940s and 1950s was that led by former Ambrose trombonist Ted Heath, a canny operator who knew how to keep the pop charts ticking over with popular numbers featuring his star singers Lita Roza and Dickie Valentine, while allowing his superb sidemen their chances to shine with numbers like Bakerloo Non Stop. Like Heath, Dankworth had started his orchestra as a touring ensemble taking residencies and playing one-nighters up and down the country. Gradually, though, as touring opportunities began to dwindle and the demand for social dancing began to wane, Dankworth transferred his exceptional compositional skills to the creation of evocative TV signature tunes and masterly movie soundtracks, his band only re- convened for the occasional tour or one-off engagement. Other bands were re-imagined as ‘tribute’ ensembles and more specifically, as in the case of the Tubby Hayes and Stan Tracey bands, whose music will also be heard at Cadogan Hall, as vehicles for the special jazz arrangements produced by band members. No dance hall gigs for them; here it was the bravura of the compositions and the creativity of the soloists that carried the day. 
On stage at Cadogan Hall for 
The Golden Age Of British Big Bands
 
Our big band journey takes us from the ‘hot’ dance bands of the 1920s catering to the ‘beautiful people’ of the day through to the touring ballroom favourites of the 1930s and beyond and alights finally in to the specialist world of these ‘jazz’ orchestras. From Crazy Rhythm to Tomorrow’s World, you could say, and this all accomplished by Long’s scintillating team and their attendant vocalists, Spats Langham, Chris Dean and Janice Day. And reverting to our opening paragraph, Long’s men will conclude the concert by paying a heart-felt tribute to the National Youth Jazz Orchestra as they recreate NYJO’s 1980s arrangement of Marie Lloyd’s timeless My Old Man Said Follow The Van. This selection underlines the extraordinary contribution made by NYJ0 in their 50-year existence to keeping the British big band tradition alive and well. NYJO alumni have rightly taken their place on the world big band stage and helped to foster and renew the big band tradition. So, bravo the British big band scene old and new: who said the golden age was over… it’s just been resting, that’s all! (pp)
The Jazz Repertory Company
Something worth making a noise about.