Jacqui Dankworth: Windmills (Perdido DOR2401)
All my Christmases came at once this month. I was assigned two new albums for review, they arrived in the same post earlier today, I’ve just played both, one after the other, and found little to choose between them or, to put in another way, if JJ still awarded stars both albums would rate four. I’ll deal with them alphabetically, ergo first up is Windmills, a new release by Jacqui Dankworth with accompaniment divided between the BBC Big Band, one string quartet and one string octet, a talking point in itself, and all three groups take an equal share in the success of this album.
Nothing if not eclectic Ms. Dankworth tops and tails the album with two rarely performed songs of equal merit. Carroll Coates’s London By Night kicks off the proceedings. It’s a song I haven’t heard performed since Sinatra included it on his 1957 album Come Fly With Me, and though she just misses Sinatra’s definitive reading by a whisker, Dankworth’s version rates an honourable mention. Similarly, the closing track is the wistful ballad Some Other Time, heard in the Broadway version of On The Town in 1944 but dropped from the film version in 1949.
In between there are readings ranging from Baubles, Bangles & Beads to Jacques Brel’s If You Go Away, a second number from On The Town, Lucky To Be Me, a traditional Irish folk tune, On Raglan Road, and a fine number written by Ms. Dankworth herself, Will You Wait For Me. An album to enhance the collection of discerning jazz buffs.
Sandra Mae Lux: Seasons In Jazz (Sandra-Mae Lux Music – SML002CD/LP)
Although Sandra-Mae Lux is a name new to me, she might have known how to arouse my interest. In her liner note she pays tribute to popular songs circa 1920-1950 which she has attempted to emulate in this album. All the music here is her own work, just as all the lyrics are the work of her regular collaborator Alan Marriott.
She cites as her inspiration Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser “and so many more”. Having played and thoroughly enjoyed the album, I have to say she falls a little short of those titans but I would not hesitate to include her in a minor pantheon, amongst such craftsmen as Allie Wrubel, Sammy Fain, J. Fred Coots, Lew Spence etc.
The pipes are reminiscent of another fine Canadian singer now resident in the UK, and although Lauren Bush may have a slight edge vocally, I doubt if she ever weighs in with the odd 16-bar break on tenor sax, as Ms. Lux does here. She is also a dab hand on piano and guitar, if anybody asks you. Speaking of musicians, she alternates here between two combos, both out of the right bottle; one features Rob Barron, piano, Tristan Paxton, guitar, Callum Gourlay, bass, Sebastian de Krom, drums, and the other Christian Vaughan, piano, Dave Jones, bass and Tristan Maillot, drums. Both groups can swing like the clappers or slow to a heartbeat as the occasion demands and rate a good 50 per cent of all the credit going to a fine album.
This, of course leaves the little matter of the songs themselves, and I’m delighted to say that there isn’t a clinker amongst them. Both writers have learned, and respect the rules; one note, one syllable, true rhyme, no assonance, AABA, ABAB, etc. Marriott even nods to Dorothy Fields, crafting internal rhymes in There’s A Door (again all the titles hark back to the Golden Age). As a rule I have a lot of fun deriding the sloppiness of “modern” songwriters but this time around it’s a pleasure to salute two fine craftsmen.
