Because My Baby Don’t Mean Maybe Now
'Taint So Honey
Riverboat Shuffle
Dardanella
Baby Oh Where Can You Be?
That’s My Weakness Now
Changes
Oodles Of Noodles
Singin’ The Blues
So The Blackbirds And The Bluebirds Got Together
San
There Ain’t No Sweet Man
I'm Coming Virginia
Raggin’ The Scale
Oh, Miss Hannah
Louisiana
From Monday On
Bonus Track: Livery Stable Blues
Keith Nichols’ Jazz Artists and the Northern
Sinfonia
rec. live at The Sage, Gateshead, July 2006
This is exactly what it says
it is. It was Dick Sudhalter who re-wrote
the original Paul Whiteman scores back in
the 1970s, with help from Alan Cohen. The
results were unveiled in Britain in 1974.
Playing in the band was Keith Nichols, who
reconstructed the vocal parts on that occasion,
and has now returned to the orchestrations
over thirty years later. He’s also worked
from original recordings. Sudhalter has also
helped by sending over the parts for Rhapsody
in Blue - famously premiered of course
by Whiteman’s aggregation - and other songs.
Unfortunately we don’t hear the Rhapsody
here – it would have been intriguing to
hear Nichols’s take on it – but we do have
sixty-five minutes’ worth of Whiteman.
The concert was a one-off
given at The Sage, Gateshead in July 2006.
Fortunately a recording team was hurriedly
dispatched to capture the occasion on disc.
The contributors include members of the Northern
Sinfonia – twenty of them – and ten members
of Nichols’s Jazz Artists. The Sinfonia string
section consists of six violinists, one of
whom is Bradley Creswick no less. Alas the
leader, Iona Brown, is not the Iona
Brown, who died in 2004 though doubtless she’s
a fine player in her own right. For one moment
I thought we had one of those 1950s superstar
New York string sections. The Jazz Artists
are drawn from Nichols’s familiar repertory
group and include cornet player Andy Woon,
taking Bixian honours, Norman Field who assumes
the mantle of Trumbauer, alongside Matthias
Seuffert in the saxophone section. The bass
saxophone is Frans Sjöström and
he "does" Min Leibrook. (His Rollini-inspired
playing elsewhere on discs is always a joy.)
The important trombone chair is taken by Alistair
Allan and his impersonation of Bill Rank is
first class. The strings include Mike Piggott
on violin; the dynamic duo of Messers. Martin
Wheatley and Spats Langham take guitar and
banjo responsibilities. Nick Ward beats the
skins.
The scores sound terrifically
well performed. The repertory band would be
used to them, at least in the smaller band
non-symphonic arrangements but the Sinfonia
contingent round out the orchestral sound
with depth and aplomb. No leaden stuff.
To give variety there’s a
saxophone quartet to play Baby Oh Where
Can You Be? Naturally there are plenty
of opportunities for the Rhythm Boys to sing
– Allan, Nichols, Langham, and Wheatley among
them – and less well known songs are interspersed
amongst the iconic selection. Of the less
well known the virtuoso vehicle Oodles
of Noodles, a fast-slow-fast tripartite
number, is dispatched with fearsome skill
by Seuffert. The sax section is tight in San
where violin and guitar are, in the spirit
of Venuti and Lang, much to the fore. And
it’s in something like There Ain’t No Sweet
Man that we can really appreciate the
orchestral touches, that booming percussion
and the ensemble vitality of these orchestrations.
There’s even a Debussyan string introduction
to that otherwise ebullient number, From
Monday On.
All the soloists acquit themselves
very well. Woon bears the brunt with conviction.
And the set-up, even a last minute one, has
captured the orchestra well. There’s a well-produced
and elegant booklet with some splendid photographs.
You won’t catch this kind of thing very often
– maybe three or four times a century on current
form – so maybe rather than waiting you’d
prefer to catch up with the recorded evidence.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
LAKE
LACD245 [65:42]
