Doin' The New Low-Down
Reindeer Rag
Guilty
Everybody Loves My Girl
Black Beauty
You'd Be Surprised
Gonna Get A Girl
Let's Do It
Rose Room
Belle Of The Phillipines
Singin' In The Bathtub
Patrol Wagon Blues
I Can't Give You Anything But Love
Limehouse Blues
She's Got It
I'll Never Be The Same
My Sweet Tooth The Says I Want To (but My Wisdom Tooth Says No)
That Teasin' Rag
The Through With Love
The Terror
New Century Ragtime Orchestra
Recorded February 2014, Newcastle upon Tyne
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Reed player Steve Andrews contributes the droll booklet notes for this latest release from the band in which he plays, the New Century Ragtime Orchestra.
The notes are very enjoyable and mix self-deprecation with pinpoint clear information as to the arrangements and/or recordings that have informed this
20-track album. Despite the band’s name do not expect a CD stuffed with Joseph Lamb and Scott Joplin – though having said that there is one Joseph
Lamb here. The territory is spread much further than that, though, and some arcane corners are sought to keep the programme full of interest, alongside the
more obvious standards. Leader Dave Kerr undertakes most of the arrangements.
Going as we do from Ragtime to early Swing, there’s plenty of material from which to choose. It’s notable how out-of-the-way things have been sought. Doin’ the New Lowdown, a song Marty Grosz loves, is based on the 1929 Berlin recording by Lud Gluskin’s orchestra. The stage is set for deft and
articulate solos, good period voicings and rhythm, such as one hears in Reindeer Rag with violin and banjo solos. Guilty is taken at a
good slow tempo. Caroline Irwin takes the vocal – she is listed in the personnel as ‘Chanteuse’, with more than just a hint of cocked eyebrow, I suspect.
The peppy side of the repertoire is to be heard in Everybody Loves My Girl though it’s more-than worthwhile to hear guest Keith Nichols’
arrangement of Duke’s Black Beauty.
Given the time and given the place, a certain amount of innuendo is to be expected and we duly get it in You’d Be Surprised with its saucy verbal
subtext. That the band gets a great ‘feel’ for the ensemble and solo style of hot Dance Bands and jazzier outfits of the second half of the 1920s can be
gauged from Gonna Get A Girl – another out of the way number culled from a Jackie Sounders record of 1927. It seems to bear out one thing I
greatly enjoy about this band and this disc, which is something Andrews says of this performance of Rose Room: ‘a pretty obscure version of a
well-known tune’. That’s the name of the game for this orchestra; it searches out rare arrangements, all for the better.
Patrol Wagon Blues
, a number immortalised by Red Allen, does – it’s true – sound a little ‘soft’ in comparison with the original but amends are mend via the chamber jazz of I’ll Never Be the Same, with Nichols at the piano. The other guest on the disc is drummer Nick Ward. The remainder of the programme seeks out Hot
Dance numbers and strong tunes, played with period style by the band. Ensemble is its great strength, rather than any stand-out soloists, though solos are
invariably well-taken. Good repertoire is the name of the game for this orchestra; and it searches out rare arrangements, all for the better.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
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