“Better say yes, better say now. Better say ready, better say pow!”
Not Nicola Sturgeon’s latest rallying cry for independence, but rousing lyrics from Claire Martin’s final number of the first set, the aptly named Out Of My Continental Mind, which drew the following defiant remark from former SNP MP Michelle Thomson seated one row behind: “We’re not leaving.”
Neither was the appreciative audience at the end of the BBC Big Band’s brassy celebration of legendary leading ladies. Though the irony of having seventeen pale, male though far from stale musicians on stage suggests the glass ceiling extends from the boardrooms of business to the business known as show too.
Led by the twinkly-eyed and velvet-voiced conductor Barry Forgie whose arrangement of Count Basie’s signature tune One O’Clock Jump would give Edinburgh Castle’s One O’Clock Gun a run for its explosive groat, and bookended by two Benny Goodman crowd-pleasers, the latter of which featured a blistering solo by Tom Gordon on drums, it’s little wonder that the ensemble have been voted Best Big Band at the British Jazz Awards – eight times.
Divas (“not in the pejorative sense,” clarified Forgie, whom Martin described as “the thinking woman’s Chippendale”) may have been the theme of the evening, and true enough many of the greats were referenced – from Carmen McRae and Sarah Vaughan to Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington – but the musical selections were as much about the male songwriters, arrangers and band leaders of the era.
Most notably Billy Strayhorn’s Chelsea Bridge featuring the renowned Martin Shaw on flugelhorn; Jerome Kern’s I’m Old Fashioned with a rare slow-building intro from Jeremy Brown on bass and Robin Aspland on piano; and Buddy Rich’s arrangement of the aforementioned One O’Clock Jump with whom the Edinburgh-born saxophonist Jay Craig toured America and Europe and on which vibraphonist Anthony Kerr provided va-va-voom.
But with so much brass bellowing and blowing, the pinnacle of which was an ear-piercing opener to the second set by Max “the screamer himself” Lovatt, what was required was body and soul. And Clare Martin OBE (one barnstorming entertainer) provided just that with a selection of jazz standards followed by a roof-raising rendition of Duke Ellington’s I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But The Blues and a samba-shimmying take on Irving Berlin’s Cheek To Cheek.
Though judging by the rapturous applause, the highlight for many in the audience was the only song not to receive an introduction – because it needs none: The Man That Got Away made famous by Judy Garland which Martin afterwards described in the understatement of the evening as “a big sing” on account of having to sit down to deliver its vast emotional and vocal range.
The night may be bitter and the stars may have lost their glitter, but as composer Harold Arlen and lyricist Ted Koehler put it in another of Martin’s standouts I’ve Got The World On A String: “What a world! What a life!” To which I would add: What a voice!
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