Moonlight Serenade Orchestra at Balboa Park August 21: Not Just a Swing Cover Band

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, August 21) I went to another “Twilight in the Park” concert at Balboa Park’s Organ Pavilion to hear the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra. They’re a group that began as the Chula Vista Community Band in 1996 and has been together ever since. They’ve been pretty much a fixture at the Twilight in the Park concert series since 2005. Despite what you might think from a band that named itself after Glenn Miller’s theme song and starts their appearances with Benny Goodman’s, “Let’s Dance,” the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra is not just a tribute band to the swing era: they play a wide variety of material. I happened to re-read my 2024 review of the Moonlight Serenade Orchestra (https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/08/moonlight-serenade-orchestra-plays.html) and was a bit surprised that back then I actually liked their excursions into post-swing repertoire. This time around I just found them irritating. They opened with “Let’s Dance” and then did a quite solid rendition of Louis Jordan’s “Let the Good Times Roll” (there are at least three songs with this title, but the Jordan one, later covered by Ray Charles, was the one they actually played). The band’s front person, Ed De Bergh, sang it acceptably and got the infectious spirit right. After that they brought on their female vocalist, Lynn Howard-Green, for a run-through of “Orange-Colored Sky,” which Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton recorded in 1951. I remember hearing the Cole/Kenton version for the first time on a download of a radio broadcast paying tribute to Kenton, and the record ends with a typical Kenton-style brass blast. Then Cole laconically comments, “I thought love was quieter than this” – to which I joked, “Of course you did! Your wife had sung with Duke!” (Cole’s wife – and Natalie Cole’s mother – had sung with Duke Ellington in the mid-1940’s under the name “Marie.” Her legal name was Maria Ellington, but Duke didn’t want to bill her that way because even though she wasn’t related to him – she’d got the name “Ellington” from a short-lived marriage to an African-American servicemember – Duke didn’t want people to think she’d got the job through nepotism.)

After that Howard-Green did another vocal, a quite lovely rendition of Harold Arlen’s and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg’s 1939 classic “Over the Rainbow.” She followed that with a song by Richard and Robert Sherman called “I Wanna Be Like You,” which she and De Bergh mistakenly announced was from The Lion King. It’s actually from the 1966 animated musical The Jungle Book, the last film Walt Disney personally produced, and it was performed on the soundtrack by Louis Prima (so they got that right). Then Ed resumed the vocal chores for the 1920’s song “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” and while the Marcia Forman Band had done that one better on their Twilight in the Park concert August 19 (at least partly because their singer, drummer Ray Conseur, sang it a lot more pleasantly than De Bergh), that too was a satisfying rendition. After that the concert went off the rails big-time with a cover of the Village People’s 1978 hit “Y.M.C.A.” for which they asked the audience to stand and do the “Y”-“M”-“C”-“A” hand gestures. I liked the song back in the day even though generally I couldn’t stand disco, and I remember joking that the Village People’s three big hits sounded so similar they could combine them into a song called “It’s Fun for a Macho Man to Stay at the Y.M.C.A. and Then Join the Navy.” Alas, the recent revelation that “Y.M.C.A.” is Donald Trump’s favorite song has pretty much soured me on it. Then Howard-Green, who was consistently the best thing about the show, returned for Bobby Troup’s “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” which they played in a Nelson Riddle arrangement written for the Route 66 TV show in the early 1960’s. (Nat “King” Cole had the hit, but though he and Riddle frequently worked together, Cole’s version of “Route 66” had only himself and his trio.) Then they played one of the better songs of the night, Count Basie’s “Little Darlin’,” which they did as an instrumental; I’d have liked it even more if Howard-Green had sung Jon Hendricks’s lyrics to Neal Hefti’s original, but even without the singer it was a charming number that showed off what this band does best.

Afterwards, though, they threw the audience another curveball when they played Bob Seger’s anti-disco anthem “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll.” In the late 1970’s it would have been inconceivable to hear “Y.M.C.A.” and “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” on the same bill, and once again the band wasn’t helped by the fact that the New Catillacs had done a much better version of the same song just one night earlier. Afterwards De Bergh did a version of Billy Joel’s ballad “Just the Way You Are” that was pretty hopeless – like Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” “Just the Way You Are” was one of those songs I liked at first; then it got played so often I not only grew tired of it but decided I actively hated it; then it faded from the charts and a few years later I heard it again and thought, “That’s not a bad song at all.” Then Howard-Green came back for a cover of Aretha Franklin’s rewrite of Otis Redding’s “Respect” (Aretha didn’t just cover Otis’s version; she added a lot to it, including the strain, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me/R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Take care, T-C-B”) and then she did the vocal version of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” After yet another foray into the late 1950’s R&B/soul repertoire – The Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me,” sung once again acceptably by De Bergh – the band closed with their namesake song, Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” and then for an encore featured an all-out version of Benny Goodman’s hit “Sing, Sing, Sing” (actually composed by Louis Prima with an interjection of “Christopher Columbus” by Jimmy Mundy). I was a bit disappointed that on “In the Mood” and “Moonlight Serenade” they didn’t try to copy the so-called “Glenn Miller voicing” of a clarinet doubling the saxophone line an octave higher (an effect actually invented by Duke Ellington for his 1933 record “Rude Interlude”), and on “Sing, Sing, Sing” they featured their drummer, Bill Dutton (as Goodman had with his drummer, Gene Krupa), but did not do the great interlude in which Goodman, backed only by Krupa, played a long clarinet solo that came as close as Goodman ever did to the pure klezmer style of Jewish folk music. The Moonlight Serenade Orchestra put on a great show, even if their blend of styles seemed a bit arbitrary at times, and I admire them for how well they stay together even though all of them have day jobs. But there was still an air of “what might have been” about their concert!