Rockin' Jazz Big Band Lives Up to Its Name at "Twilight in the Park" Concert August 6

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

Yesterday afternoon (Wednesday, August 6) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring a group called the Rockin’ Jazz Big Band, whose name alone was irresistible to me. They turned out to be a full-sized big band with the classic swing-era lineup – four trumpets, three trombones, five saxes, piano, guitar, bass, and drums – playing a mixed repertoire that drew on 1950’s and 1960’s big-band songs along with modern rock and pop tunes done up in swing style. The program opened with Quincy Jones’s “Soul Bossa Nova,” which he originally wrote in 1962 for one of his big-band albums on Mercury (with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, of all people, as the flute soloist!) but which got recycled by Mike Myers for the Austin Powers movies, which spoofed the James Bond mythos. Then their female singer, Vanessa Costana (I’m guessing at the spelling of the name because the band’s leader, drummer Bill Dutton, barked out the announcements so quickly they were hard to decipher), sang the song “Sway,” an English-language adaptation of the Mexican song “¿Quién Séra?” originally made for Dean Martin in 1953 but more recently covered by Michael Bublé. Afterwards Dutton himself croaked his way through a cover of Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” which he initially announced as a song from 1966 but later, after he performed it, corrected to 1959 and said Darin’s version had come from his Live at the Copa album that year. Then Vanessa Costana moved back to the forefront for a cover of “Moves Like Jagger” by Christina Aguilera and Maroon 5. She got to sing the next song as well, “Sabor a Mí,” which Dutton admitted he didn’t know who wrote it (Mexican composer Álvaro Carrillo), but Costana phrased far better in Spanish than she had in English.

Afterwards the band played a 1972 song by Stan Kenton called “A LIttle Minor Booze,” which Dutton recalled hearing for the first time at one of Kenton’s “Band Camps,” regular events Kenton hosted to train the next generations of big-band musicians. Oddly Kenton never seems to have recorded this in the studio, though various live versions are available online, including the 1972 original from a concert at Redlands University in southern California. Dutton remembered being particularly struck by the five-trombone ensemble, and the version he played was good even though the rather chintzy keyboard instrument his piano player was using couldn’t come close to duplicating the sound of Kenton’s piano. Then, having opened his concert with the theme for the James Bond-spoofing Austin Powers movies, Dutton played a surprisingly strong version of the Monty Norman-John Barry “James Bond Theme” itself. After that the band brought on a middle-aged Black singer named Lou Don Jones (once again, that’s only my approximation of his name as Dutton announced it) for a striking cover of Lou Rawls’s 1976 comeback hit “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine,” with Costana on hand to sing the original backing vocal. Jones then stayed on stage for two covers of hits Frank Sinatra recorded with Nelson Riddle’s studio band for Capitol in the 1950’s, Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” (originally written for Fred Astaire) and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Kudos to the bass trombonist on the latter who ably duplicated Milt Bernhardt’s solo on the Sinatra/Riddle original!

Then Dutton announced the next number as a tribute to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, quite possibly not realizing he’d already unwittingly done a tribute to them in “Night and Day” (and I still think the audio-visual representation of them performing that song in the 1934 film The Gay Divorcée is its all-time best recording). He picked “I Won’t Dance” from one of their more obscure movies, Roberta (1935), which was withdrawn from circulation for decades because MGM bought the rights from the original studio, RKO, to remake it as Lovely to Look At (1952). After that came the most moving selection of the evening, Vanessa Costana singing a medley of Eydie Gormé’s 1953 hit “Piel Canela” and the far more familiar “Frenesi,” a Mexican song by Alberto Dominguez Borrás that became a hit in 1940 by Artie Shaw. Shaw had just returned from a vacation in Mexico where he’d heard that song and another Mexican selection, “Adiós, Mariquita Linda,” and enjoyed them. Then he announced his decision to retire, until he got a notice from his record label, RCA Victor, that reminded him he still owed them six songs on his current contract. Shaw decided to recruit a studio band, including a string section, in L.A., record the six songs, and then truly and finally quit the music business. Only among the songs he recorded were “Frenesi” and “Adiós, Mariquita Linda,” and “Frenesi” became such a major hit that his managers talked him into putting together another band and going on the road to capitalize on it. Having only heard “Frenesi” before from Shaw’s recording and a ghastly cover attempt by Glenn Miller, both played as instrumentals, I didn’t realize it had Spanish-language lyrics, which Costana sang beautifully.

The next song was “Hopelessly Devoted to You” by John Farrar, originally written for Olivia Newton-John to sing in the movie Grease, and whoever did the Rockin’ Jazz Big Band’s arrangement did Costana no favor: the song was pitched about a key too high for her and the big top notes Newton-John had nailed proved screechy in Costana’s rendition. The official program closed with Buddy Rich’s 1966 arrangement of Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” originally recorded by him with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet two years earlier, though after a surprisingly long delay there was an encore: “Mambo Caliente” by Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, who defected to the U.S. in the 1970’s. Bill Dutton announced the piece by saying that Count Basie had helped Sandoval get into this country, though both the reporting at the time and Sandoval’s Wikipedia page said his sponsor was Dizzy Gillespie. Whoever helped Sandoval get in the U.S. and have a spectacular jazz career deserves gratitude. “Mambo Caliente” was composed in 1992 for the soundtrack of the film The Mambo Kings (a haunting story about a struggling Cuban-American band desperate to make their national reputation by winning a guest shot on I Love Lucy; Desi Arnaz, Jr. played his father in the film), and it was a great closing number even though the sustained high-energy level was getting to be a bit much for me. Still, I had fun listening to this concert, and it’s worth noting that the Rockin’ Jazz Big Band’s Web site offers various sizes of the group to people putting on weddings and other major or semi-major public events. Way to go!