London City Big Band makes Ronnie Scott’s debut
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
How can an unrecorded young big band that came together just three years ago sell out two main act shows at Ronnie Scott’s Club over a week before their performance in September? The word had got around from their monthly bookings at the Spice Of Life in Soho that this is a tight, talented band of students and graduates from London’s jazz colleges that plays imaginative arrangements of music from the likes of Count Basie and Thad Jones and that is about as professional as you can get.
For their debut at Ronnie’s they had nationally acclaimed trombonist Mark Nightingale guesting and it was difficult to know quite who inspired who. Much of the credit for this set up is down to musical director and trumpeter Barney Lowe, not that long out of the Guildhall School himself. A visiting trumpeter from Seattle sitting beside me commented that “…he is a really good leader, he has the ability to make everyone around him look good.”
Add in the talents of so many UK young bloods and it is a great bake off – saxophonists Tommy Andrews, Alec Harper, Sam Braysher and Nadim Teimoori excelled and the band and the audience did not allow Andrew Linham to end his baritone sax solo on Thad Jones’ ‘Three In One’ until his breathe finally ran out.
Mention should be made of trumpeter Miguel Gorodi’s extended solo on another Thad Jones number, ‘Low Down’, and of course Mark Nightingale whose solos were as good as you’d expect. The band benefits from having along two charismatic college graduate singers, Billy Boothroyd and Harriet Syndercombe-Court who know how to swing and had the audience and the band well onside with numbers from the ‘Sinatra At The Sands’ album and the Diane Schuur songbook. Only Mark Nightingale took a solo on one of the vocal numbers, the ballad ‘Deedles Is My Name’, and I should have liked to hear some of the other musicians let loose to solo on songs like ‘Please Be Kind’ and ‘A Lot Of Living To Do’. If, like others, you couldn’t get a ticket for Ronnie’s, catch the band at one of their Spice Of Life gigs.
– Ian Maund
For more info go to www.londoncitybigband.co.uk