U. S. Navy Band Southwest Closes the "Twilight In the Park" Concert Series

Two Band Units Play Swing, Pop and Conventional March Material.

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 24) I went to the final concert in this year’s “Twilight in the Park” series at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The featured act was the U.S. Navy Band Southwest, led by Lt. Matt Shea, and their concert was actually divided into two parts with an intermission between them. This lengthened the program to the point where it didn’t end until 8 p.m., and the temperature was getting chilly enough I actually needed the jacket I’d knotted around my waist before the night was through. The first part was mostly big-band swing and pop, beginning with a version of the 1931 song “All of Me” based on one Count Basie’s band recorded in the mid-1950’s. Then they did something they called “Sing the Same Song” which was actually a tweaked version of Benny Goodman’s 1937 swing classic “Sing, Sing, Sing” (itself a tweak of a 1936 pop song by singer-trumpeter Louis Prima, one of many who tried for the “white Louis Armstrong” market niche). The Navy Band didn’t introduce most of their members, but I especially liked the pianist on “All of Me” (even though he played much more fully than the legendarily spare Basie) and the drummer on “Sing, Sing, Sing.” The band consisted not only of musicians in the current lineup but alumni as well – the MC joked that once you’re a Navy musician, you’re always a Navy musician no matter how long you’ve been out of the actual service – and the next two songs were Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and Anthony Newley’s “Feeling Good.” Both of these featured vocalists; “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” was sung by Troy Gillis, a hot, hunky, dreadlocked Black man who wasn’t Stevie Wonder but came within hailing distance of the original.

The MC announced that they were playing “Feeling Good” in an arrangement recorded by Michael Bublé, and when I heard that I dreaded the worst. “Feeling Good” was written by Anthony Newley for his musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd, and in the early 1960’s it was introduced to the jazz repertoire by two Black women singers, Carmen McRae and Nina Simone. Carmen’s version, from her album Woman Talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyt74Mxh4FA), was recorded live in 1964 with a small jazz combo (Norman Simmons, piano; Ray Beckenstein, flute; Joe Puma, electric guitar; Paul Breslin, bass; Frank Severino, drums; and José Mangual, bongos) and is powerful, simple and eloquent. Simone’s version was saddled with a totally awful arrangement by Hal Mooney, a staff arranger for Mercury Records in the 1950’s and early 1960’s whose disgustingly tasteless charts did their level best to ruin otherwise great records by Simone, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. Mooney’s hatchet job on “Feeling Good” made it sound like it was being played at a strip club, and – alas – his arrangement has been copied by all too many singers who’ve done the song since, including Jennifer Hudson as well as Bublé. The Navy Band’s version was sung by Spencer Hoziman, who in the opening chorus managed to create a fine romantic mood backed only by the band’s rhythm section. Then in the second chorus Mooney’s strip-club horn parts kicked in and the mood was destroyed. The swing/pop portion of the concert closed with a medley of the various U.S. Armed Forces’ service songs, opening and closing with the Air Force anthem “Wild Blue Yonder” and in between presenting “Semper Paratus” (the Coast Guard anthem and the one almost nobody who wasn’t actually in the Coast Guard knows), “Halls of Montezuma,” “The Caisson Song” and “Anchors Aweigh.” I was more than a bit surprised that a Navy band didn’t save the Navy’s song until the end (or open with it, or both), but it was a fun medley and the drummer in particular made those old service songs swing. I also noticed that one of the trombone players was using an odd mustard-yellow instrument and wondered if it were made of plastic, like the white Grafton alto sax Charlie Parker used on some of his last gigs and Ornette Coleman made into a trademark.

After the bizarre intermission in last night’s U.S. Navy Band Southwest concert in the Organ Pavilion, the “wind ensemble” portion of the group reassembled for the second half. This part of the concert featured more traditional band material – marches by John Williams (the “Liberty Fanfare,” composed for the reopening of the Statue of Liberty in the 1980’s), Fred Ricketts’ “H. M. Jolly” (apparently a nickname for a British Marine; Ricketts’ best-known work is the “Colonel Bogey March” famously used as the theme song for the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai), “Commando March” by Samuel Barber (his only piece for wind band; Samuel Barber isn’t the first name that comes to mind as a march composer, but he’d just been drafted for World War II and this was his response), and the inevitable closer, John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” with a quite good solo by a featured piccolo player (a woman who got to play the march’s famous piccolo break on her own rather than as part of a section). The band also played more unusual repertoire, including two pop songs – “For Good” from the musical Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire’s prequel to The Wizard of Oz, sung by Kristiana Rojas and Tory Gillis, and “The Prayer,” David Foster’s hit song for Andrea Bocelli and Céline Dion (a bilingual duet in English and Italian) sung by Rojas and Spencer Hoziman. (I’m only guessing at the spelling of the names of the singers.) Then they played a band medley of songs from the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story: it kicked off with the opening strains of “Maria” and then went into “I Feel Pretty,” a fuller version of “Maria,” “Something’s Coming,” “Tonight,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Cool,” “America” and a reprise of “Tonight.” A couple of the songs in the arrangement, notably “One Hand, One Heart” and “Cool,” seemed a bit recherché for a greatest-hits medley, especially one that did not include “Somewhere,” but overall it was a pleasant enough ride through some pretty familiar music. For the nominal “encore” the band did “America, the Beautiful,” with a wrenchingly powerful vocal by Troy Gillis that sounded like he’d learned the song from the Ray Charles version, and then “Stars and Stripes Forever” as the last piece. It was certainly a spectacular way to end the 10-week “Twilight in the Park” concert series!