Moonlight Serenade Orchestra Plays an Appealing Mix of Classic Swing and Later Pop-Rock at "Twilight in the Park" August 28

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

Last night (Wednesday, August 28) I went to the next-to-last “Twilight in the Park” concert of this summer’s season, and since he had the day off work my husband Charles was able to come with me. The band was the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra, named after Glenn Miller’s theme song, and as their name suggests they’re mostly a cover band of 1930’s and 1940’s swing classics. But they’ve broadened their repertoire enough to encompass songs like Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” The Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited,” Ritchie Valens’s and Los Lobos’s “La Bamba” (their front person, singer Ed de Brach, seemed confused by the two hit versions of the song), Billy Joel’s “My Life” (not “Just the Way You Are,” which would have fitted more closely to their usual material), Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” and The Champs’ 1958 instrumental novelty hit “Tequila.” Their musical director is Bob Tutleman, who also soloed on clarinet and tenor saxophone and led off the proceedings with Benny Goodman’s theme song, “Let’s Dance.” Then they played Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive and Wail,” a song first recorded in 1956 for Prima’s album The Wildest! that became a hit again in 1998 when the Brian Setzer Orchestra covered it and it became one of the key songs of the short-lived swing revival of the 1990’s. Singers De Bergh and Lynn Howard traded vocals on the song and Rick McDonald played a hot trumpet solo.

The next tune on their program was Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing”), which Ellington had originally written as a jazz instrumental but to which he quickly added lyrics when Brunswick Records’ producers decided the record would sell better with a vocal. He had just hired Ivie Anderson, one of the greatest jazz singers of all time (and one of the unluckiest; had it not been for her chronic asthma, which forced her to retire in 1942 and led to her death seven years later, she’d have been as big a solo star as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald). Lynn Howard’s vocal didn’t come close to Ivie’s but she acquitted herself well and did justice to the song. Then they played “Livin’ La Vida Loca” as a vehicle for their electric guitarist, Neil McDaniel (whom De Bergh called “McDonald” by mistake, probably because that was the name of their trumpet player whom they’d just featured on “Jump, Jive and Wail”). After that they did a cover of the 1926 jazz age hit “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” which De Bergh introduced as a happy, upbeat song. That’s what it was intended as, but there’s also a macabre connection with the death of star dancer Isadora Duncan, who in 1927 was accidentally killed when her scarf got caught in the axle of the car she was riding in and strangled her. (Remember that this was a time when cars still had open fenders.) Duncan had long had a premonition that her death would be heralded by blackbirds, and when her heirs cleared out her home after she died the record she had left on her phonograph – the last song she’d ever listened to – was “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” De Bergh introduced it as a song by Count Basie, but the earliest Basie record I’ve been able to find of it was a live performance from 1969, decades into Basie’s career as an active bandleader. I looked up Basie’s live version this morning, and it was the version the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra was copying, not only the piano introduction (played by Jay Berman on an electronic keyboard) but the long tenor sax solo by Bob Tutleman (and on Basie’s record it was probably Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis).

The next song on their program was “I’m So Excited,” with another Lynn Howard vocal, and after that they played “Take the ‘A’ Train.” There was a glitch in the sound on that – the song’s second trumpet solo was virtually inaudible, a rare mishap in what’s otherwise been great sound design by Dave Wave Studios all season – it was a good, straightforward performance, though I’d have loved to hear Lynn Howard do the vocal part Betty Roché added to Duke Ellington’s extended 1952 recording. The next song was “Mr. Bojangles,” which De Bergh introduced as a tribute to Sammy Davis, Jr. The song was actually written by country star Jerry Jeff Walker, who according to the Wikipedia page on “Mr. Bojangles” “said he was inspired to write the song after an encounter with a street performer in a New Orleans jail. While in jail for public intoxication in 1965, he met a homeless man who called himself ‘Mr. Bojangles’ to conceal his true identity from the police. Mr. Bojangles had been arrested as part of a police sweep of indigent people that was carried out following a high-profile murder. The two men and others in the cell chatted about all manner of things, but when Mr. Bojangles told a story about his performing dog who was killed by a car, the mood in the room turned heavy. Someone else in the cell asked for something to lighten the mood, and Mr. Bojangles obliged with a tap dance.” Apparently Walker had never heard of the original Mr. Bojangles – the great Black dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson – but Sammy Davis, Jr. certainly had. Bill Robinson had been Davis’s dance teacher, and when Davis performed the song – first on a late-1960’s TV special and then at a command performance at the White House for Richard Nixon in 1970 – he turned it into an intense, emotional tribute to his long-departed colleague. (Robinson had died on 1949, and he was so beloved in Harlem crowds of people gathered in the street to watch his coffin, as if the President had just died.) Ed De Bergh’s rather foghorn-ish voice was hardly in Davis’s league, but he did his best and the double tribute to Robinson and Davis became a moving one.

Then they did a fun version of “La Bamba” and a quite good cover of “My Life” – as I said earlier, this isn’t the first Billy Joel song I’d have thought of that would make good material for a neo-swing band, but they did it quite well, with De Bergh singing one of his best vocals of the night and Drew Hilliard playing a stunning alto sax solo. After that they played Glenn Miller’s legendary hit “In the Mood,” which was actually ripped off from “Hot and Anxious,” written in 1931 by Horace Henderson for his brother, bandleader Fletcher Henderson. (Fletcher’s record, with a clarinet solo by Coleman Hawkins and a guitar solo by Clarence Holiday – Billie Holiday’s father – is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwzB1GsnK8o, and Miller’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVh3ZzVDZik.) The Moonlight Serenade Orchestra did full justice to “In the Mood,” including duplicating the dueling tenor saxophonists from Miller’s record. Then they did a brief sing-along to the song “Happy Birthday” in honor of their drummer, D. J. Jackson, who according to De Bergh had played with Aretha Franklin and Johnny Mathis. After that they did an unexpected cover of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll,” his famous anti-disco song from 1978 (my then-girlfriend Cat and I loved that song because we both hated disco, and it became our anthem), and then Lynn Howard did her best singing of the night on “Over the Rainbow.” The song was first introduced in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, and became Judy Garland’s signature song for the remaining three decades of her life – though she understandably got sick of it. It was composed by Harold Arlen with lyrics by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, and Harburg recalled that the first time Arlen played him the melody, he elaborated it with so many classical runs and tricks Harburg said, “That’s all wrong for a farm girl from Kansas.” The next time Arlen played it for him he’d got rid of all the ornaments and played the song simply and straightforwardly. Harburg accepted it and then had to come up with an idea for a lyric, and he said he hit on making the song about a rainbow because it’s the only bit of bright color a girl growing up on a Kansas farm would have seen. Then they returned to the world of rock ‘n’ roll with a cover of The Champs’ 1958 instrumental hit “Tequila,” and got the audience (including me) to call out the word “Tequila!” whenever it appeared in the song.

They closed with Glenn Miller’s theme “Moonlight Serenade,” and while they did not duplicate the stunning voicing Miller used with a clarinet doubling the sax line an octave higher (Miller got credit for inventing that in 1939, but it had actually been used by Duke Ellington six years earlier in “Rude Interlude”; Duke’s is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAcx9U_d2u0 and Miller’s is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ws6DdrDtyo), they played it well and blessedly their version, unlike Miller’s, included the haunting lyrics Mitchell Parrish added later. For the inevitable encore they played “Sing, Sing, Sing,” originally written in 1936 by Louis Prima but transformed by Benny Goodman a year later into one of the longest (nine minutes, on two sides of a 12-inch 78 record at a time when the larger records were usually reserved for classical music) and most “epic” records of the swing era. While the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra didn’t duplicate my favorite part of the Goodman record – the long stretch in which Goodman, backed only by Gene Krupa’s drums, reverts to his klezmer origins – they turned it into a spectacular showcase for drummer D. J. Jackson, and he responded with some of the hottest drumming I’ve heard in quite a while. While I’ve heard the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra in better form (especially when Ross Porter was still their male singer), and their programming wasn’t quite as adventurous as the American Flyboys in an earlier “Twilight in the Park” concert on July 9 (the American Flyboys and the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra actually share some of the same personnel), the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra still turned in a quite entertaining concert and the audience had a lot of fun.