Gaga For The Crooners: A Frank 100 Years.

Being a terrible singer I've always admired a chap who can start to sing and reduce the ladies to jelly.  The exact opposite happened to me - giving up singing was one of the preconditions outlined in my marriage agreement.  I won the girl by keeping my mouth shut.

Crooning to Kidman - A Little Bit Of Robbie

Now rather than concentrate on the fine crooners who have graced the movies in rather conventional romantic scenes we thought we'd give you a selection of somewhat off the wall crooning moments on film such as crooning to a horse,  a beer and even crooning to accompany a psychopath’s delusional fantasy?  Here's our blog of movie clips showing famous faces using the classic croon in ways you'd least expect:

Homer Simpson serenades Duff Beer:

The original Jeepers Creepers sung by Louis Armstong to a horse:

Goldie Hawn and Dean Martin formulate political philosophy in song:

Never was a love song more alarming than in the hands of The Shining's Jack Nicholson:

And Woody Allen breaks the heart in Everyone Says I Love You:

"Triumphant!" A sparkling review of our Newport Jazz Festival concert at Cadogan Hall!

REVIEW: Newport Jazz Festival Celebration at Cadogan Hall (2014 EFG LJF)

Pete Long, on stage at Cadogan Hall

Newport Jazz Festival Celebration
(Cadogan Hall. Tuesday, 18 November 2014. EFG London Jazz Festival. Review by Peter Vacher) 

Richard Pite, The Newport Jazz Festival concert producer

Drummer/impresario/historian Richard Pite’s ingenuity and enthusiasm know no bounds, it seems. Fresh from presenting a well-received LJF programme celebrating Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman’s New York heyday just days before at the same venue, here he was back in this uplifting space to recall the 1950s Newport Jazz Festivals, again to a full house of highly appreciative listeners.

The premise here was simple enough: recreate Duke Ellington’s 1956 Newport Suite, factor in Cole Porter’s music from the movieHigh Society, move on to photographers Bert Stern’s evocative documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day, leap forward to the Dizzy Gillespie big band and their 1957 NJF offerings and conclude matters with Duke’s immortal Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.

The Newport Jazz Festival, Cadogan Hall, for the EFG London Jazz Festival

Well, simple to say perhaps, but mightily challenging to accomplish. It needed a cast of, not thousands, but certainly twenty, all hand-picked to suit and a level of commitment that allowed the proceedings to move well beyond pastiche and on to creative replication. This was epitomised when tenorist Mike Hall, given the unforgiving task of recreating the seminal Paul Gonsalves solo on D&C, chose not to chase a note-for-note duplication but to give its unrelenting surge a twist of his own, with Pete Long’s superb orchestra in full cry behind him. Earlier, young altoist Simon Marsh had evoked the memory of Johnny Hodges on Jeep’s Blues with due care and attention before the band essayed the multi-part Newport Suite.

With Long’s opening clarinet cadenza duly done, trumpeter Ryan Quigley made the first of a number of impressive incisions, soaring high over a crunching trumpet section, the band bounding in with gusto. ‘High Society’ gave trumpeter Rico Tomasso his head, especially so on ‘Now you Has Jazz’, Louis-like for sure, but couched in his own heart-felt manner, trombonist Ian Bateman on song alongside, with Long similarly fluent. Whether the show needed the soft-centred Little One and the rest of the film’s balladry may be questionable for all that Spats Langham coped well as an ersatz Bing Crosby.

High Society Medley, Georgina Jackson, Iain MacKenzie 

Tomasso-Bateman- Long, the last of these three on tenor, then gave Blues Walk a cheery going-over before pianist James Pearson essayed Blue Monk, momentarily allowing us to picture its composer from Stern’s film before Georgina Jackson reminded us of Anita O’Day’s impact with Sweet Georgia Brown/Tea For Two. Then followed more Louis from Rico, then Dizzy’s formidable Cool Breeze and Manteca as dealt by this terrific ensemble, Quigley and fellow-trumpeter George Hogg making high notes seem easy. Then came Hall’s finisher. He looked triumphant and so he should but then that goes for the whole presentation. Put aside one or two bits of cheesy stage biz, and look for this package to live again. It was that good.

The Jazz Repertory Company has  more surprises in store for 2015.

Review by Peter Vacher

http://www.londonjazznews.com/2014/11/review-newport-jazz-festival.html?m=1

A Feature By The Jazz Journal; The Newport Jazz Festival, 18th November 2014

Sixty years of Newport jazz

A concert from Richard Pite’s Jazz Repertory Company as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival in November marks 60 years of the Newport Jazz Festival

In the year the renowned Newport Jazz Festival is 60, "Newport Jazz Festival: The 1950s" comes to Cadogan Hall as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Presented by the Jazz Repertory Company, the 18 November concert will feature music fromJazz On A Summer’s Day (1959) (which saw Anita O’Day’s captivating performance of Tea For Two/Sweet Georgia Brown) and High Society (1956), as well as Duke Ellington’s Ellington at Newport album (1956) which included Paul Gonsalves’s famous 27-chorus solo on Diminuendo And Crescendo In Blue. The Jazz Repertory Company, led by drummer Richard Pite (pictured), specialises in putting together "authentic live recreations of the greatest music in jazz history."

Original Newport Jazz Festival organiser George Wein (who is now 89 and still actively involved with the event) described Ellington’s 1956 appearance as "the best performance of Ellington’s career … it stood for everything that jazz had been and could be."

The music will be performed by the Echoes of Ellington Orchestra directed by Pete Long, who has also played his part in Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Orchestra and Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. The concert will also feature Georgina Jackson as Anita O’Day, Enrico Tomasso as Louis Armstrong, Iain Mackenzie as Frank Sinatra and Tom Langham as Bing Crosby.

Tickets are between £18 and £32 and the concert starts at 7.30pm. You can book tickets online atefglondonjazzfestival.org.uk and find out more about Richard Pite’s Jazz Repertory Company at jazzrep.co.uk.

Sally Evans-Darby

For Sale: Waving Goodbye To The Drum Kit That Drummed For Kylie

I’m selling a drum kit.  Quite an extraordinary drum kit too.  It’s a Trixon Speedfire  - have a look at it here.  It’s lovely isn’t it.  It looks like something that would be played by a band in a groovy night club in The Jetsons.

 

Here it is being played by me in the gym at Harrow School.  (the first time I’d been in a gym for about 35 years).

This was for an advert for a motor car made by Lexus.  I featured in the ad for 0.00007 of a second but in this film (just before Kylie appears) you can admire the beautiful eccentricity of the drum kit’s design for quite a bit longer.  You can also admire the Prince of Wales check on my second hand Armani suit.

Back in 2003 I fancied buying myself an unusual drum kit.  A chap in Munich was selling one so I decided to motor down and purchase it.  I took along my old drumming mate John Sutton so that he could keep me amused on the autobahn.  It was a freezing night and inevitably my clapped out Nissan Prairie broke down – we had conked out by a little emergency telephone box and so I whimpered in English and in five minutes a big burley mechanic turned up and asked me to open my bonnet.  He then proceeded to start bashing something underneath the bonnet with a very large mallet.  I have no idea what he did but the engine started immediately and we made it all the way back to Leytonstone with the Trixon and with no further trouble and they didn’t charge me a penny. We love those Germans!

So the poor Trixon has been living in the cellar for quite a few years now – it’s absurd design hidden away in its cases.

Now I wanted to buy a painting.  My wife Joy thought this would be a perfect opportunity for me to raise the funds by selling my ridiculous mid-life crisis car.

But as I’m still going through the mid-life crisis – (so far I’ve clocked up 15 years and have about another 5 to go)  I said I’d sell the Trixons instead.

Here’s the painting

This is lovely too and we can look at it all the time rather than have the Trixons unused and hidden away.

So, before it goes on ebay is anyone interested?  It’s £2,900.  (a drum shop in central London had one up for sale at £5,000 – it had been used by the drummer in Bill Haley and the Comets but the condition was rotten – not a patch on mine).

You don’t have to be able to play the drums just have the room for a little bit of modern art – you could use it as a coffee table.

Why A Jazz Vacuum Cleaner Sells Better Than A Concert

Pitie's Mini Musing:

As someone involved with marketing jazz, I’ve been aware for some time of the desirability of avoiding the “J” word so as not to put off a large chunk of the paying public.  However if you’re selling any other product but the music itself it seems to be a positive advantage.  I don’t know who compiled the list (otherwise I’d give them a credit) but a hell of a lot of surfing hours must have gone into proving the point:

It is not jazz, it is an economical car. 

It is not jazz, it is a vacuum cleaner. 

It is not jazz, it is a case for an electronic diary.

It is not jazz, it is a child's toy that switches from being a car in to a robot. And back again. 

See the rest of this amusing article here.

Going All Tarantino On Cadogan Hall

Jeep's Blues.  Choosing the right tracks for your movie.

Quentin Tarantino doesn't use film composers on his movies - he takes great records and matches them to the action with an impressively adroit touch.  It made me think that I'd love the job of combining my favourites with the upcoming movies of the modern masters (but not dealing with the endless legal wrangles to get permission to use them!).  Here is my short list of some of the finest matchings  of sound and visuals.

2001. A Space Odyssey

• The Blue Danube.  Johann Strauss.  2001.  A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick 
• Natural High. Bloodstone.  Jackie Brown.  Quentin Tarantino. 
• Up Up and Away. The Fifth Dimension.  Born on the Fourth of July. Oliver Stone

Woodstock

• Wooden Ships. Crosby Stills and Nash.  Woodstock.  Michael Wadleigh
• Funeral Canticle. John Tavener. The Tree of Life. Terrence Mallick 

The Tree Of Life

And from TV:

• On a Clear Day.  The Peddlers.  Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad

Now what brought this on was thinking about Jeep's Blues - The Duke Ellington number which opens our Newport Jazz Festival tribute concert on November 18th at Cadogan Hall.  This was used in the terrific movie 'American Hustle'; and what an inspired choice.

Jeep's Blues, Duke Ellington, American Hustle

See it here (I also love the use of Chicago's 'Does Anybody Know What Time It Is') - so I'll stick those two on my list.  I'd be interested to hear of any other particularly brilliant choices that you love - I hope to discover some more memorable moments.

Jackie Brown

Sax Exploits: Saving Duke Ellington

We're staging a 60th Anniversary Tribute concert to The Newport Festival at Cadogan Hall on November 18th as part of The London Jazz Festival, heavily featuring some of the finest work of jazz luminary Duke Ellington. Here's a tremendous piece from a few years back by The Guardian's jazz critic John Fordham. He succinctly sums up just what an important gig this was for The Duke, re-booting Ellington's flagging career.

Fordham: "In an electrifying performance by the band, Gonsalves – who hadn't played the piece in a while, and was initially uncertain of his way around it – played 27 improvised choruses in a raunchily R&B and gospel-inflected manner. It was an astonishing example of a musician playing way out of his skin – and one who had never been in Ellington's front rank of star soloists."

The 1956 Newport Jazz Festival appearance helped keep him and his band in clover till Duke left us in 1974. Follow the link for the full Fordham article.