Jazz band sparkles in SPAC show
by Matthew Maguire, The Knickerbocker News, August 11, 1981
The music of New Orleans is rough and rambunctious — precisely what you’d expect of art conceived in bawdyhouses. Executed with proper verve, it compensates for any lack of polish with high-spiritedness.
So it wasn’t difficult to overlook a pervasive roughness around the edges of the Dixieland presented by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on Monday evening before 2,500 fans at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
In two sets of just under an hour each, the seven-piece combo offered a program of standards similar, if not identical, to the show it gave last year at SPAC. There were upbeat tunes such as “Hindustan,” “Bourbon Street Parade,” “Tiger Rag” and “You Tell Me Your Dream and I’ll Tell You Mine”; slower, bluesier numbers, such as “St. Louis Blues” and “Basin Street Blues”; spiritual hymns, such as “Amen,” “This Little Light of Mine” and “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”; and the required closer, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” complete with a march through the house.
The seven veteran musicians delivered these tunes with the pizazz necessary to keep them from disintegrating into a mishmash, in which each tune sounds like its predecessor.
In the polyphonic ensemble passages, clarinetist Willie Humphrey, trumpeter Percy Humphrey and trombonist Frank Demond expertly blended their simultaneous improvisations on the melody, creating lyrical, swinging choruses.
The solo improvisations by the front-liners also worked well, although only Willie Humphrey excelled. He plays especially well in the middle registers, where he elicits a deep, husky tone on the clarinet. His solos were the highlights of virtually every tune.
When the pace lagged a bit, the band members played every musician’s trump card — showmanship. Trombonist Demond would get up and clap his hands theatrically, conning the audience into joining him. Or clarinetist Humphrey would ham it up with soft shoe or shuffling. Such antics helped divert the attention from musical moments which bordered on the mediocre.
At any rate, enough fun was had to keep the musical weaknesses from overcoming the show. Garbled lyrics on one spiritual and an abortive singalong effort on another tune, an embarrassingly inconsistent sense of time, and other minor musical difficulties couldn’t keep the audience from having fun. And that’s all that counts with this music.
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