American Flyboys Present Unusual Concept at "Twilight in the Park": Big Band Versions of 1960's, 1970's and 1980's Pop-Rock Songs

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, July 9) I went to the latest “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion, featuring a band called “American Flyboys” who have an unusual concept. Musically they’re a big band in the classic style of 1935-1945, with brass (trumpets and trombones), reeds (all saxophones) and rhythm (electronic keyboard, electric bass and two drummers, one playing a regular trap set and one playing congas and bongos, the latter with sticks instead of by hand). But their repertoire consists mostly of pop-rock songs of the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s arranged in swing-band style. They opened with a hot version of the Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” and then played Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” They identified the last song with Tina Turner instead, but given how completely Tina transformed this song (slowing it down at the beginning and then speeding it up until it became an energy rush far beyond what its composer, John Fogerty, had envisioned) that’s an understandable mistake. Their third song was Steve Allen’s “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” and after that they put on a female vocalist called Giselle (almost no one in the band got introduced with both their names) who sang a nice bossa nova-ish song called “Sway.” (I had briefly thought this would be a cover of the Rolling Stones’s "Sway,” but it wasn’t.) Their next piece was an instrumental called “Green Onions,” originally recorded by the Memphis soul band Booker T. and the M.G.’s in 1962.

After that they brought on a male singer named Chris Jaus for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?,” the Academy Award-winning song by Elton John (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics) from Walt Disney’s 1994 animated film The Lion King. Jaus’s understated vocal didn’t have the raw emotion of Elton John’s (no surprise there!) but it was a nice alternate reading. Then they played another instrumental, Mason Williams’ 1968 hit “Classical Gas,” and an unusual vocal version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with Giselle as lead vocalist and Chris Jaus singing backup. I was glad that they slowed the tempo down for the third verse and allowed Giselle to sing the alternate lyric. Instead of, “As he died to make men holy/Let us die to make men free,” she sang, “As he died to make men holy/Let us live to make them free.” After that they played their one piece all night that actually came from the original swing era, Glenn Miller’s hit “In the Mood” (actually a 1939 ripoff of Horace Henderson’s 1931 “Hot and Anxious,” recorded by the band led by Horace’s brother, Fletcher Henderson). Since no one in the American Flyboys’ sax section doubles on clarinet, they couldn’t duplicate the famous so-called “Miller voicing” – a clarinet doubling the sax line an octave higher (actually invented by Duke Ellington for his 1933 recording “Rude Interlude” six years before Miller started using it) – but they still turned in a hard-swinging version of the piece. Their next song was Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” sung by Ray (once again they didn’t introduce him with a last name) with some nice boogie piano by Sabrina Thomas (the band’s only female instrumentalist). They announced they learned the song from the soundtrack to the movie Pulp Fiction, and unlike most of their songs it sounded pretty much like Berry’s original, just with more horns.

Then they went back to the 1940’s for Ary Barroso’s “Brazil” – the first Brazilian song actually to become a pop hit in the U.S. Following that, the band’s leader announced they were going to play “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” a song written by Four Seasons songwriters Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe and first recorded by Four Seasons lead singer Frankie Valli. Though Valli released his version as a solo artist and said he liked the song because he wasn’t required to use the falsetto voice he generally sang with in the Four Seasons, the American Flyboys bandleader said he primarily identified the song with a woman, Vikki Carr, whom he’d had a crush on “in the day.” He had Giselle sing the song last night so it would still be done by a woman. The next song was “Kansas City,” written by white rhythm-and-blues writers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and originally recorded in 1952 by Little Willie Littlefield for the Federal label (the R&B subsidiary of the country label King Records, though later the two were folded together and Federal’s biggest artist, James Brown, ended up on King) but revived by Wilbert Harrison for a 1959 hit. The American Flyboys’ version seemed based mainly on the one Count Basie recorded for his 1966 album Basie’s Beatles Bag (though the version The Beatles had actually recorded was not the Leiber/Stoller one Littlefield and Harrison recorded, but one extensively tweaked by Little Richard for his cover). After that the band played one of their mystery instrumentals, “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris – which, like the Surfaris’ original, was a feature for their drummer – and then for the final piece on their official program they played The Drifters’ hit “Save the Last Dance for Me” with Chris Jaus singing. Their near-obligatory encore was “Second Line,” which I momentarily hoped would be a Duke Ellington cover from his stunning 1970 New Orleans Suite album. Instead it was a traditional New Orleans march, one of the tunes bands played while marching on the way back from a funeral, and the dancers in the crowd formed the titular “second line” as they snaked past the stage in loose formation – a great way to end a quirky but quite entertaining program.