Marcia Forman Band: Great Neo-Swing Combo Plays at Balboa Park Organ Pavilion June 27

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Charles and I decided to hang out in Balboa Park Tuesday, June 27 and await the “Twilight in the Park” concert, which was given by a five-piece group called the “Marcia Forman Band,” which turned out to be an excellent neo-swing ensemble who played a wide variety of songs. Marcia Forman herself is a 60-something alto saxophonist, and her husband of 35 years, Floyd Fronius, plays violin with the band as well as several others, including a group called “Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas” which I presumed was a country band but instead plays Irish folk music. Their Web site says the band’s purpose is “to explore the connections between Irish traditional and American roots, and infusing a rock band delivery, while still utilizing all acoustic instruments.” Among the eight members of Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas is Media Arts Center San Diego head Ethan Van Thillo, someone my husband Charles and I have known for years but without any idea that he was a musician. The other three members of the Marcia Forman Band last night were electric guitarist Armand Fregon (I’m guessing at the spelling of his name because he’s the one member who isn’t listed on Forman’s Web page), bassist Gedeon Geek (who played an upright bass but one with a slender body designed to be used with an amplifier) and drummer Ray Conseur.

They played a wide variety of songs, including 1960’s hits like Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny” and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s hauntingly beautiful “Dindi” (the standout track on the first of two albums Frank Sinatra made with Jobim) along with swing tunes and standards. They opened with Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and also did Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” Hoagy Carmichael’s and Ned Washington’s “The Nearness of You,” an intriguing reggae-ized version of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess (lyrics by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin), and as an encore Jimmy Van Heusen’s and Johnny Mercer’s “I Thought About You.” The Marcia Forman Band also did a few songs decidedly off the beaten path, including the Redd Evans-Joe Riscardel novelty “The Frim Fram Sauce” (a hit in the mid-1940’s both for Nat “King” Cole and a duet between Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald) and a traditional “Frälich,” a Jewish wedding dance that inspired some of the biggest swing-era hits, including “Bei Mir Bist du Schön” and “And the Angels Sing.” For the “Frälich” Forman switched from alto to soprano sax, and I think Charles liked this song better than anything else they played; when the MC started demanding an encore from the rather perplexed band, Charles yelled out, “More klezmer! More klezmer!” (I remember when klezmer had its mini-revival in the early 1980’s I heard some and thought, “So that’s where Benny Goodman came from! The parts of his style he didn’t rip off from Black New Orleans clarinetists came from the folk music of his own people – duh!” Records like Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” and Artie Shaw’s “Concerto for Clarinet” have long clarinet solos, accompanied only by drums, that show off the klezmer roots of both Goodman and Shaw.)

There were also three numbers that featured a singer, Camille Sallave, who’s in a three-piece band called Whiskey & Burlap that’s an off-shoot of Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas, Camille did three great songs with the band: Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah, I Love Him So” (gender-swapped from the original “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”), Bobby Troup’s “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” (a huge hit for Nat “King” Cole in the mid-1940’s) and “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” by Louis Jordan and Billy Austin. Jordan’s record was one of his biggest hits, though my favorite version is a “Soundie” (a three-minute film meant to be played on a “Panoram,” a sort of video jukebox that had a brief vogue in the 1940’s; they were essentially the music videos of the time) made by the Nat “King” Cole Trio and featuring Cole’s vocal duet with Ida James. When I first saw that clip (it’s now on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q_t-rB9tU8) I was astonished that this woman singer I’d never heard of could hold her own in a duet with the great Cole, and later I learned that Ida James had previously been a band vocalist with Earl “Fatha” Hines but she still hadn’t had the career she so richly deserved. The Marcia Forman Band’s performance was a truly pleasant surprise: an hour and 20 minutes of sheer infectious joy from musicians who clearly know what they’re doing and play with real heart and soul.