Blue notes
It's always a pleasure to report the success of a jazz event, and the City Festival organisers should be warmly congratulated on Big Band Fest at City Hall Theatre.
I attended the first night - there was also a Saturday matinee - which played to a nearly full house, and apart from MC Phil Whelan getting his Chinese and Japanese big bands mixed up, it went without a hitch.
Putting on five bands in a single evening is a challenge in itself. When they have on average 18 members each, it becomes considerably more so.
If it was intended to be a 'battle of the bands', they turned out to be remarkably evenly matched. Tokyo's Mondaynight Jazz Orchestra were, to nobody's surprise, the slickest of the bunch. Lando Bernal's Big Broad Band looked to have a tough time following them, but played a very strong set, including an audacious version of Sonny Rollins' Airegin.
The Stray Katz Big Band performed with the most show business pizzazz of the night, and the set included some entertaining banter between Whelan and band leader Mike Legge. The Basic Notes Jazz Big Band also had a good evening, the high point of their set being Why Don't You Do Right?, sung by Creamy Lam.
The man of the night, however, was Saturday Night Jazz Orchestra leader Taka Hirohama, who had organised the whole thing. He led his band through a fine swinging set and presided over a grand finale, featuring as many of the musicians from each band as was feasible playing When The Saints Come Marching In on the stage and in the aisles.
More music in the same vein is on the new Telarc album by Tony DeSare, Radio Show.
Some readers may remember DeSare from his residency at the Captain's Bar of the Mandarin Oriental following its grand reopening in 2006.
The inspiration for his third CD is 1940s radio, and the album is presented in the format of a 50-minute programme, complete with DJ links from Saturday Night Live's Joe Piscopo. The idea isn't wholly original - the Who did essentially the same thing in a 1960s pirate radio format on The Who Sell Out - but in an era when people download tunes one at a time from the internet, it strikes a blow for the integrity of the album.
As DeSare says in his liner note, having recommended that listeners switch off mobile phones before playing, 'Radio Show is best experienced played in order and in its entirety.'
Live, DeSare performs a mixture of jazz standards, pop and rock tunes and his own compositions, and that mix is well-represented here. The album includes Harold Arlen's Get Happy, Hoagy Carmichael's Lazy River and an almost hymnal reading of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a Changing.
My favourite is a solo piano version of Chuck Berry's guitar standard Johnny B. Goode, and DeSare also makes a pretty good fist of Ray Charles' Hallelujah I Love Her So.
Long-time associates Mike Lee on bass and Brian Czach on drums were retained for the sessions, and the great Bucky Pizzarelli contributes some characteristically swinging guitar.
