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REVIEWS: HOT COMBINATIONPershore Jazz Club, June 2008
The evening was filled with a range of numbers played with passion and conviction from that period of jazz so dear to the hearts of the band. Admiration for Cliff Edwards aka ‘Ukulele Ike’ was apparent with Spats' ukulele and high pitched scat singing on ‘He’s the Hottest Man in Town’ and more ukulele gymnastics on ‘Good Little Bad Little You’. More names appeared like a roll call from the ‘golden age’ — ‘Got a Date with an Angel’ made famous by Al Bowlly, nice bass and sax from Malcolm and Norman. ‘Melancholia‘ and the very South American ‘Bessame Mucho’ from the Oscar Aleman repertoire. Jack Hylton’s ‘Shepherd of the Hills’ featured a tuba solo from Malcolm and Norman’s C-melody sax. Spats and Danny on guitars delighted us with ‘Guitar Blues’ and ‘Jet Black Blues’ from the days of the Lonnie Johnson-Eddie Lang band and reproduced a realistic zither sound for the ‘Harry Lime Theme’ from The Third Man. Norman’s clarinet and C-melody sax brought the dancers out with ‘Take Me to the Land of Jazz’ and then Danny took to mandolin for ‘Sing Song Girl’. So many tunes, so much history. No wonder Humphrey Lyttleton called them ‘jazz archaeologists’. Thanks to the Hot Combination for a wonderful evening of nostalgia from the more relaxed, vintage years of jazz. — Pershore Jazz Club, June 2008 |
Spats made a welcome return to Pershore, this time with his Hot Combination and some complimentary words for our ‘new’ venue (we were in Number 8 when he was last here). And what a combination it was, every permutation of the instruments on hand blending into the band’s unique acoustic sound of the 1920s complete with Spats’s 78rpm vocals.
‘The Ghost of St Louis Blues’ featured a creepy horror introduction and before ‘My Sweet Virginia’, Spats related another horror story involving Tommy Burton’s beer and Nat Gonella’s false teeth! There was such lot of the evening to remember with numbers like ‘Singin’ in the Bathtub’ with Norman on bass clarinet, the eastern style banjo and clarinet on ‘Leena from Palestina’, and the gentle ‘Just Like a Melody from out of the Sky’.
