GREAT Concert by the Coronado Big Band at the Organ Pavilion July 2!

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

Last night (Tuesday, July 2) my husband Charles and I went to one of the stronger concerts I’ve ever heard in the Twilight in the Park series at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion. The group was the Coronado Big Band, which judging from the fact that they were advertised in the Twilight in the Park program as “Swing, Big Band Music” and that we’d heard one of the saxophonists warming up before the concert with the opening lick of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” (the one for which the Beatles were sued for plagiarism because they lifted it for the coda of “All You Need Is Love”) I’d assumed would be a swing-era nostalgia band. That couldn’t have been more wrong! Though the lineup was that of a classic-era swing band – four trumpets, four trombones (one of them a bass trombone), five saxes (two altos, two tenors and a baritone) and three rhythm (electric piano, electric bass and drums – apparently the piano at the Organ Pavilion wasn’t in tune or in good enough shape for them, so their pianist, Hindy Bare – the group’s only female member – had to play an electronic keyboard), their repertoire was anything but. They focused mostly on recent big-band arrangements and pieces from the 1950’s and beyond. Only one of their songs was a classic swing-era standard: Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” as famously “tweaked” by Benny Goodman and his band into a long feature for the drummer (Gene Krupa with Goodman, Chris Becker here). What’s more, the band played with real precision and snap and were almost totally free of the shaky intonation and section blends that mar most amateur bands. Their opening was something called “Marie’s Shuffle” by Tom Kubis, a 70-something band saxophonist and arranger from the L.A. area. Then they played “Emily,” the main theme from Johnny Mandel’s score for the 1964 film The Americanization of Emily (which co-starred James Garner and Julie Andrews in their other film together, 18 years before Victor/Victoria).

The next piece on their program was an elaborate fantasy called “Tequila Sunburst” by Chuck Owen – at least that’s what I think they announced; I was unable to check it online because the only listings I could find for songs with “Tequila” in their names were for the two different “Tequila”’s and “Tequila Sunrise.” After that they played the imperishable ballad by Bernice Petkere, “Lullaby of the Leaves,” though in back-announcing the song they credited it to Jim Young, who was just the lyric writer. I was a bit put out that they didn’t credit the woman who actually composed the song (and though the words are quite beautiful, since they performed it as an instrumental the lyrics didn’t matter) and I spent a few minutes brainstorming what other songs from the swing era that became standards were written by women. Aside from Mary Lou Williams – a special case because she was songwriter, arranger and pianist for Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy in the 1930’s – the ones I thought of were Dana Suesse’s “My Silent Love,” Ann Ronell’s “Willow, Weep for Me” and Maria Grever’s “What a Difference a Day Made.” What’s more, many of those didn’t actually achieve standard status until decades after they were written. “What a Difference a Day Made” came out in the early 1930’s but didn’t achieve standardhood until Sarah Vaughan revived it in the late 1940’s and Dinah Washington did it in 1959 (a breakthrough hit for her that “broke” her as a crossover artist selling to white audiences). As for “Lullaby of the Leaves,” written by an amateur who’d been a housewife, Petkere’s lovely tune didn’t become a standard until Gerry Mulligan recorded it in 1952 on the “B”-side of “Bernie’s Tune,” his first quartet record with Chet Baker on trumpet and no piano. Getting back to the Coronado Big Band, they next played an original by Maynard Ferguson called “Cruisin’ for Bluesin’.” Ferguson had an odd career trajectory; he began as trumpet player and occasional singer for Stan Kenton, then left the Kenton band to go out on his own. He had a brief comeback in the 1970’s when he signed with Columbia Records and started putting out a series of albums called M. F. Horn (get it?).

After that they played a somewhat quieter piece by George Stone called “Autumn Nocturne” and one by Dave Colby called “Hello There.” Then the band performed “Shiny Stockings,” which they announced as by Count Basie; it’s true that his band introduced it, but it was actually written by one of Basie’s tenor saxophonists, Frank Foster, and arranged by Sammy Nestico. (The Coronado Big Band credited Nestico but not, alas, Foster.) The next number on the band’s program was a piece called “Lazy Bird” by John Coltrane – not a name you expect to hear mentioned in a big-band concert. It turned out to be a song from his early (1957) album Blue Train, and one I hadn’t registered because I and a lot of other people got it confused with “Lady Bird,” a song by bebop jazz composer Tadd Dameron (with whom Coltrane recorded on the album Mating Call in 1956). The last song on their set list was “Sing, Sing, Sing,” a great special feature for drummer Chris Becker, and for the obligatory encore they picked another item from left field: “Manteca,” co-written by bebop co-creator John “Dizzy” Gillespie and the Afro-Cuban conga drummer Chano Pozo, whom Dizzy brought to the U.S. from Cuba in 1947 and who was killed in a Harlem street brawl a year later. The Coronado Big Band gave pianist Hindy Bare a rather corny “tico-tico” lick to make up for the fact that they didn’t have a conga player or any other Latin percussion, but they otherwise did a great job on this exciting piece of material. The band’s overall sound was that of big-band jazz from the 1950’s and 1960’s rather than the 1930’s and 1940’s: loud brass and a swaggering, aggressive attack. There may have been some people in the audience who would rather have heard something closer to the 1935-1945 music most people think of when they hear the words “big-band swing,” but I quite liked what the Coronado Big Band played and I give them a lot of credit for playing a wide range of far-reaching repertoire instead of either cranking out the old swing hits or, as some other modern big bands have done, trying to remodel more recent rock and pop hits and do them in big-band style.