Marcia Forman Band Plays Exciting Jazz Concert at "Twilight in the Park" August 19 – With Just a Sprinkling of Klezmer

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, August 19) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring the Marcia Forman Band, of which I had vague memories from a previous year. Marcia herself is a middle-aged Jewish white woman who, praise be, brought along her husband, Floyd Fronius, who joined the group on jazz violin. Fronius usually plays with the Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas, a sort of country-punk group which when they play at Twilight in the Park (they’re scheduled to close the current season on August 28) have to censor their name to Back Pocket Whiskey Fellas. But he fitted in beautifully with his wife’s jazz playing. Forman played mostly alto sax, though she switched to soprano on two songs, “Give It Up or Let Me Go” (a blues number written and recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1972 and also done by the Chicks, formerly the Dixie Chicks – oddly they got rid of the word “Dixie” but kept in the word “Chicks,” which a lot of feminists thought was a hopelessly sexist way to refer to women) and a piece called “Freylakh #1” that was her one concession to her klezmer roots. “Freylakh,” which is Yiddish for “merriment,” was the name of a traditional Jewish dance usually performed at weddings. Ziggy Elman, trumpeter with Benny Goodman’s band in the late 1930’s and later with Tommy Dorsey and on his own, grabbed hold of the freylakh style, first in Goodman’s 1937 record of “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen” (a novelty that combined Yiddish and English lyrics) and then in an original called “Freylakh in Swing” Elman recorded instrumentally on one of his own dates and then, with a lyric by Johnny Mercer, became a hit song in its own right called “And the Angels Sing.” I’d been researching the history of freylakh because I just got a review assignment for Fanfare for a release called Contrasts featuring a trio for clarinet, violin, and piano by Paul Schoenfield (1947-2024) in four movements, three of which bear the names of Jewish dances: “Freylakh,” “Niggun” (spelled “Nigun” on some CD releases), and “Kozatzke.” Marcia Forman and Floyd Fronius caught the klezmer spirit beautifully.

When I got to the Organ Pavilion at 6:15 p.m., the Marcia Forman Band was already in full cry playing a hot sound check on Thelonious Monk’s classic “Blue Monk,” and after last Thursday (when I didn’t get the message that the Matt Hill and the Black Spurs concert was starting half an hour early so Raúl Prieto Ramírez and his 38-piece pickup symphony orchestra could have a rehearsal for last Monday’s “do”) my heart sank. It turned out it was only a sound check, and the concert proper began with a great swinging version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Then they played a marvelous version of Bobby Hebb’s 1960’s hit “Sunny,” though rather than Hebb’s original they evoked memories of Stan Kenton’s instrumental cover on his 1967 album The World We Know. The next song was the 1920’s classic “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” sung by the band’s drummer, Ray Conseur – and he actually had a quite nice voice, unlike a lot of instrumentalists who try their hands (or throats) on vocals. After that they did “Sway,” which Forman announced as having been covered by Rosemary Clooney and Michael Bublé. The song’s history is more complicated than that; it was originally written by Mexican composer Luis Demetrio in 1953 as “¿Quién Será?” (“Who Will It Be?”) and first recorded by bandleader Pablo Beltrán Ruiz that year. In accordance with a common practice of the day, Beltrán demanded a “cut-in” credit as co-writer in return for recording the song. The first English-language version was cut by Dean Martin in 1954 as “Sway,” with a new lyric by Norman Gimbel that transformed the song from a tale of heartbreak to a man’s ode to his partner’s prowess on the dance floor. Rosemary Clooney recorded a cover in 1960 and in 1999 a British electronic dance music duo called Shaft released a version that sampled Clooney’s record. The owners of Clooney’s copyrights sued and successfully had Shaft’s version taken off the market, whereupon Shaft merely re-recorded their version with a new vocalist, Donna Canale, and that one reached #2 on the British charts. Michael Bublé recorded the song on his third album (and first for a major label) in 2003 and it was released as a single, but only in Australia (where it became a hit). I recognized “Sway” from the performance by the Rockin’ Jazz Big Band on an earlier Twilight in the Park concert August 6.

Then Forman brought forth a quite engaging singer named Camille Ku’ulei Sallave – though she announced her merely as “Camille” – for a great song called “Give It Up or Let Me Go,” written and originally recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1972. It was part of a short-lived movement among feminist blues singers to write blues songs that would give up the sexist he’s-a-no-good-bastard-but-I-still-love-him tropes of previous blues songs and portray their heroines as self-actualizing, independent women. (Holly Near’s “Get Off Me, Baby,” later covered by Helen Reddy, was another example, though actually there had been plenty of blues songs about independent women joyously getting rid of no-good men in the classic era, too.) Then she showed off her romantic chops in a lovely version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You” before the band returned for an instrumental version of Lennie Niehaus’s “Bunko.” Niehaus is a former Stan Kenton arranger who’s best known for being Clint Eastwood’s arranger on the scores Eastwood composes for most of his movies these days, and Forman proclaimed “Bunko” as “ear candy,” the sort of song you can’t forget whether you want to or not. Then Camille returned for “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” written in the late 1940’s by white singer/songwriter/pianist Bobby Troup and an enormous hit for Nat “King” Cole. After Forman’s tribute to her Jewish roots with “Freylakh No. 1,” the band returned for an encore: Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” which he wrote for the Cannonball Adderley Quintet when he was its keyboard player, and it became a major crossover hit in 1967. Blessedly, Forman’s merch table is still selling CD’s – indeed, she had four of them for sale at $10 each, and I bought two of them. One was a 2014 duet with electric guitarist Bryan Whelan which I got because it contained a version of “Blue Monk,” though like the other tracks on the album it was just Forman’s alto sax and Whelan’s guitar, without the other musicians that had made the sound-check version of “Blue Monk” (what little I’d heard of it) so immediately appealing. The other was her most recent release, Geodesic Tones, and it was valuable not only because it gave me the names of her current band members (herself, Ku’ulei Sallave, Fronius, Conseur, guitarist Armand Frigan and bassist Gedeon Deák) but because it included three of the songs (“Bunko,” “The Nearness of You,” and “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”) she’d played in her Twilight in the Park set that night.