DVD Review: Blandings

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If your idea of British country gentry comes from Downton Abbey, P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings will orrect that very quickly. Lord Emsworth and his Blandings family are a far cry from Lord Grantham and the Downton crew.

A two disc DVD set of the six episode first series of the British TV adaptation of the Wodehouse stories is scheduled for release in the U. S. on September 3 from Acorn. The series stars Timothy Spall as Clarence Emsworth, the Lord of the manor, a bumbling, but lovable eccentric whose only real interest in life is his beloved pig, Empress. Jennifer Saunders plays his disapproving sister whose main object in life seems to be to civilize her brother. Mark Williams is the dependable butler who is as much a friend of the family as he is a servant, and Jack Farthing is the heir to the estate, a silly fool of a ne’er do well.

Classic stereotypes, these and the supporting characters are all played with broad strokes just short of the kind of thing you’d be likely to see in a Benny Hill sketch. Lord Emsworth can’t remember anyone’s name, indeed he can’t remember much of anything. Saunders’ Connie is a controlling martinet, and Williams’ butler is the essence of practical wisdom. Minor characters are similarly stereotypical: a Scottish gardener with an accent so thick no one can understand a word he says, a fortune hunting widow with a bratty young son, a chorus girl masquerading as a foreign princess. There isn’t an actor in this cast who is unwilling to go over the top. It’s almost as though they were told the broader the better. And not only do they get away with it, they embrace the silliness and it works.

The plots of each of the episodes are farcical enough to justify the acting style. The first episode deals with a contest for the fattest pig, the last with the fortune hunter’s machinations. There are episodes concerning his sister Connie’s attempt to straighten Lord Emsworth out by hiring a controlling secretary, her ploys to keep various nieces away from suitors that she finds unsuitable, and one where the foolish Freddy thinks he’s married a showgirl.

Much of the humor deals with things like pigs with gas, manure, clumsy suitors knocking over furniture, manure, mistaken identities, manure, visiting city ragamuffins, and manure. Did I mention muck? Talk about an excremental vision. If you’re looking for gentile drawing room comedy, Blandings is not for you

By any reasonable meausure, I should hate this show. By any reasonable measure but one; it can be laugh out loud funny. The characters may be unrealistic stereotypes, the acting may be way over the top, the directors may indulge themselves in silly sight gags, but none of that really matters if you find yourself laughing. And there wasn’t an episode that didn’t manage to get me laughing. Frothy perhaps, but how often is it that show aims at froth and falls flat. Certainly not all the gags work, but enough do to make this show a lot of fun. Effective froth is no mean achievement.

Lord Emsworth and his family may not remind many viewers of the Downton crew, they are certainly pale shadows of Wodehouse’s own Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, but how many are there that measure up to bars that high. Blandings is a lot of fun.

Music Review: Christian McBride and Inside Straight - People Music

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People Music, the title of bassist Christian McBride and Inside Straight’s follow up to their debut album Kind of Brown, refers to what McBride calls his “personal mantra as a musician.” Now is a time when some jazz musicians have become so concerned with pushing the envelope that they have pushed beyond the post office’s ability to deliver the mail to anyone but other jazz musicians, and sometimes not even them. Their music has become what one 19^th century poet called “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” “People music” is music that speaks to the people. A degree in music theory is not a requirement for its enjoyment. All that’s needed are ears.

What you get on this album is mainstream, hard driving jazz played with passion and consummate musicianship. It doesn’t reject the past. It uses it. In the best traditions of the form, it builds on what has gone before. It is accessible music. If what you want is esoteric cacophony, you don’t want People Music. If you want beautiful innovative jazz, you’re in the right place.

The eight pieces on the album are all original compositions by members of the quintet. Four are by McBride. The album opens with his “Listen to the Heroes Cry,” written, he tells us in reaction to a music awards show which he found more concerned with image than with music. “It made me wonder what Duke Ellington or John Coltrane or Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughn would think if they could see this. I think they would be crying.” “New Hope’s Angel” was written in reaction to the death of Whitney Houston and “Fair Hope Theme” is an extension of the main theme McBride wrote for the soundtrack of the documentary The Contradiction of Fair Hope. His dramatically driven “The Movement Revisited” drawn from a larger Civil Rights themed suite is the longest piece on the set.

“Gang Gang,” written by vibes player Warren Wolf, is an Afro-Cuban track. Saxophonist Steve Wilson’s haunting “Ms. Angelou” features the composer playing the soprano sax. Christian Sands, who plays piano on two tracks composed “Dream Train” and pianist Peter Martin wrote the funky “Unusual Suspects.” Carl Allen plays drums on everything but “Dream Train” and “Listen to the Heroes Cry” where drums are handled by Ulysses Owens, Jr.

If what McBride was aiming at was audience friendly music, he got it, but perhaps more importantly he also got audience pleasing music. This is the kind of music you want to listen to, and you’ll want to listen to it again and again.

Music Review: Deborah Shulman - Get Your Kicks: The Music and Lyrics of Bobby Troup

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If all you know about the music of Bobby Troup is his “Route 66” road saga and the kittenish “Daddy,” songstress Deborah Shulman’s latest album, Get Your Kicks: The Music and Lyrics of Bobby Troup, will be a delightful introduction. Certainly the Troup songbook is not as ubiquitous as that of a Cole Porter or a Sammy Kahn, and that is our loss. His music deserves better, and Deborah Shulman delivers. Listen to Shulman’s coy flirtatious interpretations and you’ll begin to get an idea of what you’ve been missing.

 Although Shulman says that other than “Route 66” she hadn’t been familiar with the music before she got involved in the project, she knew that her husband had been a friend of the Troup family, and thought it would “be fun to explore the connection.” They were given access to the family’s musical library. “It was like going on a treasure hunt,” she explains, and the eleven tunes eventually chosen for the disc are treasures she, along with her pianist arranger Ted Howe and his trio, has made her own. “I wanted this to be a jazz album with a party vibe. I wanted this to be a jazz album, with no crossover.” If that’s what she intended, she hit the mark. This is an album that will have you smiling.

She opens with a mischievous version of “You’re Looking at Me” followed by a wild romp through “Route 66” featuring a lot of cool bass. Between the two they set the party tone for the rest of the album. “Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast,” delivered with a vocal wink, echoes with delicious irony . She swings with the trio in a dynamic upbeat “Daddy,” that even gets a little raucous as it ends.

Indeed, she packs all of the ballads on the CD with an honesty born, she indicates, from her own “marriage collapse.” Her bluesy “Baby All the Time” that builds to a dynamite dramatic climax is one of the album’s highlights. Bleak though they are, “February Brings the Rain” and “The Meaning of the Blues” are gorgeous tunes sung with intensity. “It Happened Once Before” looks at the emotional peril involved in making a new romantic commitment. The trio—Howe on piano, Kevin Axt on bass and Dave Tull on drums—adds some elegant solo work through all of the ballads.

“The Three Bears” is a whimsical take on the children’s story and “Lemon Twist” goes for some witty word play backed up by some equally witty solo work from the trio. “Girl Talk,” the one song on the album for which Troup only wrote the lyrics (the music is by Neal Hefti) gets a much more haunting, or as the liner notes describe it, darker treatment in Howe’s arrangement than it usually gets.

Music Review: Christiane Noll - Gifts

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Christiane Noll joins Patty LuPone and Norbert Leo Butz in Broadway Records’ 54 Below live cabaret performance series with her album Gifts. Perhaps best known for her role as Emma Carew in the musical Jekyll and Hyde, the talented singer has established herself as a legitimate member of the Broadway aristocracy, and her cabaret act demonstrates why that is.

Of course a good cabaret act assumes a fine voice, but a great cabaret act demands more. The best acts have a theme; they have a narrative arc. In the popular jargon of the trade, there must be a journey. “Gifts,” as Noll explains in a liner note, “from my father I now share with my daughter.” ”Music,” she continues, “was not only our family trade, it was how we expressed ourselves and our inner most emotions.” Family and music are her theme.

 Brought up in a house filled with music, her father was a conductor and music supervisor for CBS, her mother a soprano, she was, as she describes it in her two part medley “Growing Up,” even as a baby enthroned atop a grand piano in the family apartment, inundated with music. Her father would play; her mother would sing, and she gives us a taste, a little Puccini, a bit of Mozart, some Victor Herbert, and some Gilbert and Sullivan. As she grows, she looks to develop her own sound, leaping from “Whistle While You Work” to “What I Did for Love.”

She goes on to run through her career, from poorly chosen audition material to her Broadway success and her father’s pride in her Jekyll and Hyde debut, of course with appropriate musical examples. Then moving on to her pride in her own daughter, whose singing it turns out can tame a playground bully. It is an endearing, if perhaps a mite sentimental journey.

Along the way there is the music. She opens the set with “Somewhere Out There” from “An American Tale.” Highlights include “The Sound of Music,” an intense version of “Send in the Clowns,” and an unexpected choice in “Some Enchanted Evening.” There is a nice change of pace in the “Museum Song” from Barnum, and an homage to her Ella Fitzgerald period in her encore (in an arrangement by her father) “Mr. Paganini.” Of course, no performance would be complete without “In His Eyes,” her Jekyll and Hyde show stopper, and while composer Frank Wildhorn isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, listening to her sing his music, it is enough to make you wonder why.

Christiane Noll is as versatile a singer as you’re likely to come across, and her versatility shines through on this album. She can sing opera and art songs. She can do patter; she can swing. And if it looks like she’s found a permanent home on the Broadway stage, her cabaret act gives her the opportunity to show off her other talents.

You can check out Noll singing “The Sound of Music” and doing a promo video for the show on YouTube.

Music Review: George Shearing & Don Thompson - George Shearing at Home

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Although jazz piano master Sir George Shearing died in 2011 at the age of 91, along comes George Shearing At Home and it turns out we haven’t heard the last of him. It turns out there’s still more of his music out there for fans to savor. In this case, what we have is a duo album recorded back in 1983 where the pianist works with Canadian bassist Don Thompson.

Thompson explains: the two men began collaborating in 1982, when after many years working with his quintet, Shearing looked to the greater freedom of the duo format. In a CBC Music,  interview Thompson says: “The duo situation was really a liberating experience for George after so many years of being confined to the rigidity of the quintet. In the quintet, every note is played exactly the same every night. . . .” In 1983, the pair had a six week gig in Manhattan and they would get together in the afternoons in the living room of Shearing’s apartment and play. One afternoon, he says in the liner notes, he suggested that they “lay down a few tracks ‘just for fun.’” Shearing agreed and the result is George Shearing at Home from Jazzknight Records.

As Thompson tells it the reason it took all these years for the album to be released was because Shearing was under contract to Concord Jazz at the time and they were not interested in anything that wasn’t recorded by their engineer in their own studio. Recently when Shearing’s wife was visiting in Canada, he gave her copies of the recordings, and she agreed they needed to be made available to the public. Shearing fans will be forever grateful. This is one great pianist at the top of his game.

The album’s 14 tracks are a mix of standards and jazz classics. There is one original composition: Thompson’s own “Ghoti,” a tune with a bebop flair that features some swinging interaction between the bass and the piano. There are also four solo piano tracks. The album opens with a syncopated version of the Rogers and Hart tune “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” followed by a moody take on “A Time For Love.” The traditional  “Skye Boat Song” is perhaps an unusual choice for a jazz album, but it certainly adds variety. Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” and Lee Konitz’s “SubconsiousLee” are more likely fodder, and the duo rips them.

The solo highlights include a lovely dramatic version of that old chestnut, “Laura.” Shearing gives it new life. There is an atmospheric impressionistic take on “I Cover the Waterfront.” In the liner notes, Thompson says that when they played it at the club, Shearing would joke that it was “a beautiful piece written by Marlon Brando.” “Can’t We Be Friends?” gets a bluesy treatment that comes off as a duet between the pianist’s right and left hand. Thompson says that this is the only time Shearing played “Beautiful Love” which concludes the album.

George Shearing belongs in the piano pantheon with the likes of Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck, and this is an album that makes that very clear.

Annalisa Ewald - Live at the Factory Underground

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If you love the guitar but you’ve had your fill of hard rocking guitarists and folkie pretenders you might want to check out classical guitarist Annalisa Ewald’s Live at The Factory Underground, an unpretentious collection of varied pieces played with polish and panache in front of an appreciative if not downright rowdy crowd. As, Ewald explains in the liner notes, in October of 2012 a group of musicians and their friends got together at The Factory Underground  Studio in Norwalk, Connecticut. The studio had been transformed into a “night club for music lovers,” and three acts were scheduled to play. Ewald, the evening’s only soloist and classical artist, opened the show—a wise choice given the audience reaction.

For approximately half an hour, no doubt energized by the lively audience, Ewald played a set of 15 classical guitar pieces  chosen she tells us from “Argentine tangos, Spanish folk music, Brazilian choros, and even a couple of ‘cousins’ from the Renaissance courts.” It is an eclectic sampling of the best in the musical repertoire available for the instrument. Perhaps the only thing that’s missing is a transcription of the adagio from Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez,” a piece that no guitar recital wherever it is held should be without. Although, it does open the possibility of some future recording of the whole concerto with the full orchestra in tow. Ewald plays with skill and taste; it would be a treat to hear her in all out concert mode, this despite her protestations that the Factory Underground setting was “most unlike Carnegie Hall. Which was all to the good.” I guess I would just like to hear her play what I imagine is the most popular classical piece for the guitar in all its splendor.

She opens with “Soleares” a composition she calls “the mother of flamenco” in her notes to each of the tracks. This is followed by “Farucca,” a “light song” from the Galicia region of northwestern Spain “which speaks of sunny subjects like love and bawdy humor.” “Monotonia” is a composition particularly appropriate, she tells us, for the more informal setting, its composer Rodrigo Riera among those in 20^th century Latin America who were celebrating popular guitar music. “Por Una Cabeza” is the first of the tangos on the album, the famous “La Cumparsita” comes later embedded in “Milonga.”

Ewald is joined by her 15 year old student Caroline Golino for two Renaissance compositions: “Mr. Dowland’s Midnight” originally written for solo lute and “Les Buffons,” a variation on a familiar dance theme by W. Heckel which she calls “a perfect pub piece.” There is a “Prelude” by Hector Villa-Lobos giving a nod to the concert hall. She closes with two bonus tracks “Vals Venezolano No.1” and “No. 2” by Antonio Lauro, one of the first guitar composers, she explains, “to meld the European and Latin musical traditions.”

Annalisa Ewald may not have the name recognition that a guitarist like Sharon Isbin has, but if she produces a few more albums like this one, she’ll be right up there. Not only does Live at The Factory Underground show her joy in the music, it makes that joy contagious.

Music Review: Michel Camilo - What's Up?

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First there was John Medeski’s A Different Time, then there was Billy Lester’s Storytime, and now comes Michel Camilo with What’s Up, the third in a trio of excellent solo piano jazz albums I’ve reviewed in the past few weeks. A Grammy, Emmy and Latin Grammy Award winning pianist and composer, Camilo has put together a varied collection of seven original compositions as well as four  Latin and jazz standards highlighting the breadth of his range on the instrument. As the pianist explains: “This recording expresses my desire to explore the contrasts of color, harmonic texture, rhythm and nuances of jazz piano playing. Here is my love for the many musical influences I have been exposed to over the years.”

Whether he is revisiting his Afro-Caribbean roots in tunes like Compay Segundo’s “Chan Chan” and his own “Island Beat” or presenting his “take on the perpetual polyrhythmic intricacies” of Paul Desmond’s
classic “Take Five,” he is taking up what he calls the biggest challenge for any jazz pianist “to contribute to the rich tradition of solo piano styles.” It is this mosaic of different styles all developed with consummate virtuosity which is the hallmark of the album.

From the upbeat energy of the title song which begins the set with an energetic boogie vibe to the final contemplative coda, “At Dawn” the focus is on stylistic variety. A Camilo original like “A Place in Time” has a darker tone with roots in the classical nocturne while “Sandra’s Serenade” plays like a piece that could have come from the pen of a composer like Erik Satie. “On Fire” is a show piece for the pianist’s flashing fingers as he burns over the keys. It is a pianistic tour de force that will leave you with your mouth hanging open. A classic like “Alone Together” gets a blues treatment, and Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” has a long improvised introduction leading to the familiar melody.

What’s Up is the second release in Sony Classical’s resurrection of the fabled OKeh jazz label which is focusing on what they call “Global Expressions in Jazz.” While it is Camilo’s first effort for OKeh, it does mark the pianist’s return to the Sony Music family where he had previously recorded for Portrait, Epic and Columbia.