Velvet on the Soul

AN ENTHUSIASTIC AUDIENCE WELCOMES JACK HUTTON AND FRIENDS

“Velvet on the soul” were the words that occurred to me, at the Gravenhurst Opera House on Friday evening, 27 August 2010, hearing a smooth and vibrant blend of saxophone, string bass, piano, trombone and banjo by Jack Hutton and Friends. The warm acoustics of the Opera House were perfect for bringing to life music of the twenties, thirties and forties.

The grey-haired, multi-talented quintette played for a mainly grey-haired audience buzzing with renewed energies from their teen-aged years. The musicians evoked memories of Dunn’s Pavillion, where Duke Ellington  played six engagements and lapped up ice cream in between numbers. Now follows the line-up of artists and the pieces they played, with notes by Jack Hutton.

Ric Giorgi, string bass and violin, Toronto

Bob Livingston, trombone, Midland

Brian Bauer, clarinet and every saxophone known to man, Buffalo

Jack Hutton, piano and leader, Bala

FIRST HALF

Black Bottom (E flat)

Written by Perry Bradford, a black ragtime pianist and composer around 1909. It set off the Black Bottom dance craze after being featured in a New York variety show in 1927. We usually play it exactly the way it was originally recorded, but Brian finished with a Charleston ending that came from a recording that none of the rest of us had ever heard. That’s what makes playing with this group so interesting (and unexpected).

Clarinet Marmalade (F) 

The cutting piece which aspiring jazz clarinet musicians had to be able to play in the 1920s and 1930s

Crazy Words and Crazy Tunes, 1927, as performed by the Varsity Collegians at Gerry Dunn’s first dance hall in Bala in the 1930s. In the piano chorus, I put Fats Waller’s stride classic "Handful of Keys" on top of the tune.

Everything I Have Is Yours 1933, performed at the first and second Dunn’s Pavilions. Brian Bauer played it in the style of Frankie Trumbauer.

I’ll Never Smile Again (F)

Bob Livingston solo of the Canadian tune written by Ruth Lowe in 1939 and recorded by Tommy Dorsey in 1941 with a skinny new singer, Frank Sinatra (his first recording).

Mood Indigo (B flat) 

Recalling Duke Ellington’s six appearances at Dunn’s Pavilion

Songs of the Golden Era

Ain’t Cha Glad, written by Fats Waller G (Willie sings). Piano tried to evoke the way that Fats would have played it (he never recorded it, to our knowledge) (Helen cuts in here: And, Jack, the Waller style came across clearly.)

Georgia Cabin (E flat)

Composed by Sidney Bechet (Ric sings)

Nuages (Clouds) Django Rheinhardt 

Beautifully rendered by Will Wilson on the guitar.

　

SECOND HALF

Tribute to Richard Rodgers

If They Asked Me I Could Write A Book 

Will Wilson vocal and also Jack vocal (not scheduled)

Manhattan

Tune that launched career for Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

You Took Advantage of Me (E flat)

I’m Getting Sentimental Over You (B flat)

Audience request. Bob Livingston plays signature piece of Tommy Dorsey as played at Dunn’s Pavilion.

Michelle sung by Will Wilson

Embraceable You

Gershwin tune played at request of audience member

Body and Soul (D flat) 

Tribute to Hart Wheeler

(Note from Helen: anybody who plays anything in five flats has my awed admiration!)

The Sheik of Araby 

Request of audience member, with audience participation in refrains like “Without no pants on”

Struttin’ With Some BBQ  (E flat)

Lady is a Tramp (Rodgers Hart) FINALE

ENCORE: Lady Be Good (Gershwin) at request of audience member

　　

Thanks to Jack Hutton emailing the playlist and the fascinating background material. Jack also writes: “We had so many requests over the intermission that we could have played till dawn if we had played them all.

“There were a couple more in the second half that were unexpected ones, bowing to audience requests, but I would have to listen to cassette recordings to remember what they were! I am pretty sure that one of them was "Nothing Could Be Finer Than To Be In Carolina" by Walter Donaldson, one of the greatest composers in the 1920s.

“As you probably gathered, there is quite a love relationship between the band and that special audience, some of whom have not missed one of the seven or eight concerts at the Opera House since our first one. Also, a number of jazz scholars drive up from the GTA and New York State every time they hear that we are playing anywhere. They know we play tunes that you will not hear anywhere else, played as faithfully as we can possibly do it from long-lost old 78 rpm records.”

Again, thank you Jack!

Here is Helen to wind up this accolade with, “A grand old time was had by all.”

Scroll down to see more reviews of the 2010 Summer, and earlier Seasons

Click on the link below to view the new Gravenhurst Opera House website.

http://www.gravenhurstoperahouse.com/

Traveling Back in Time

“ENGLISH ROSE” GASSED OUT ON ITS FIRST NIGHT, A GAS ON THE SECOND

From accounts by Helen Heubi in "The Muskoka Times"

Friday 28 September, 2001, was to be the first night of two for Peter Scott’s well-knit play, “English Rose”, starring Muskoka’s own Robin Clipsham. By showtime, 8 pm, the Gravenhurst Opera House was comfortably full, the audience primed for an evening of inspired comedy and the artist ready to prance onto the stage and liven it up as if she were a whole troupe of players. That Friday evening performance, however, simply didn’t take place. Seconds before curtain time the Opera House had to be evacuated because of a gas leak.

“I was all set to step out on the stage,” said Robin Clipsham, “When I peeped through a chink and saw people getting up and leaving.” At first she thought that someone must have fallen ill and had to be taken out. Then the whole hall emptied - in less than two minutes. Robin groped her way in the blacked out stage to the headset to try to find out what was going on, couldn’t see what button to press, so pressed them all. After what seemed like a very long time, but was only a few minutes, she learned why the Opera House was being evacuated. Imagine being about to perform, only to see your audience quietly evaporate. And they didn’t have to scramble out of costume and makeup and into street clothes.

Without waste of time my friend and I had joined the orderly audience gently streaming down the stairs by the elevator and out the south entrance. As I look back I am reminded of one of those dreamlike slow motion sequences in a film, with a slight blurring and little or no sound.Outside, we saw three fire engines strategically positioned. Firemen were shrugging on their coats and heading toward the entrances. Later I asked the fire chief if the sirens had been on, and indeed they had, although we inside did not hear them. My friend and I joined the crowd on the pavements around the Opera House, and waited about half an hour until someone strolled over and said, “Robin’s gone home.”

Two teams of firefighters were sent into the Opera House to discover the source of the strong smell of gas, and found it in the basement under the Trillium Court. They also found three or four people backstage who were not aware of the evacuation, and joined us rapidly outside. Within the hour the gas people had removed the offending boiler and turned off the furnace until repairs could be completed. For the rest of the night, however, no one was allowed back in the building.

Meanwhile, across the street at the Rickshaw for a late supper I reminisced about the Saturday afternoon back in the 1940s when cottagers at Muldrew Lake decided to celebrate our annual regatta by going to the show in town, only to find the movie theatre closed for a death in the manager’s family. The town was full of Norweigian airmen, tourists, cottagers and town residents at loose ends. The younger and wilder of us crashed a dance in the town hall - now the Opera House. Other more sedate members of our party ended up in that very same Chinese restaurant for a coffee and milkshake to fortify us for the three-mile walk back to Indian Landing.

My friend couldn't join me when I saw the full performance of "English Rose". I enjoyed it enough for two people. A full review follows in a later post.

Scroll down to see more reviews of the 2010 Summer, and earlier Seasons

Click on the link below to view future shows.

http://www.gravenhurstoperahouse.com/

Three Standing Ovations for Victoria Banks

by Helen Heubi

Thunderous applause and a standing ovation welcomed Victoria Banks to the stage of the Gravenhurst Opera House on Saturday 7 August, 2010. The dazzling evening began with a cymbal salute from the band, introducing “The Wheel”, Victoria’s award-winning single, and ended on an intimate note with “The Other Side”, interpreted by no other instrument than her expressive voice. A final standing ovation had brought on this moving encore, and another followed it.

Victoria couldn’t help repeating from time to time that she always loves to return to Gravenhurst to perform in her native Muskoka. It’s been a long way from Port Carling, where she was born, to Toronto University for a BA in zoology, to Nashville, the “City of Dreams”, where she has worked for the past ten years. Pursuing her greatest passion, song writing, has not been easy. “Nashville gives you a roller-coaster ride of emotions,” she says.

Powerful words and music roll out of Victoria’s life experiences. In between songs, she shared some of these with us. Her songs tell it like it is. What to do with a wedding ring that would not go away by itself, years after the joyous marriage, the painful awakening and the inevitable divorce? The answer came in a song. 

Victoria’s gifts for writing lyrics and music had been discovered not long after she came to Nashville. She tailors her songs to the singers who request them. One artist she collaborated with is Jessica Simpson, whose rendering of “Come on Over” was rated highest charting debut country artist's single in Billboard history. Victoria knew her career had moved up a vital notch when, driving along a country road near Nashville, she heard one of her own compositions on the air for the first time. Her car radio was broadcasting Sara Evans singing “Saints and Angels”.

While flying to flooded Nashville in May of this year, after being away during the worst of its disaster, Victoria wrote a song of courage and survival, inspired by  emails from her friends there. Some had lost everything. Beneath her plane, where she expected to see downtown lights, she saw only darkness. The Grand Old Opry sat in ten feet of water. Other musicians rallied to  produce her song, “City of Dreams”, as a video, now available on the Red Cross site www.CityOfDreamsNashville.com. All proceeds from the video downloads on this site go to the Red Cross for victims of the Tennessee flood. 

You are now reading a review written by someone who grew up steeped in traditional folk music, and plenty of classical, has heard a lot of jazz and kind of gets it, but is basically unfamiliar with Country. Like Victoria's Dad, mine had a large collection of music by Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and many others whose names are not all easy to spell. Unlike her, I did not have a rock-and-roll epiphany in high school. On this sketchy background are based my perceptions of her powerful 2010 Saturday night concert at the Gravenhurst Opera House.

Despite differences in genre and generation, every song has roots. Listening to Victoria’s compositions arising from her own life, I realized that they come to her from a variety of sources like the blues, rock-and-roll, the simplest of folk melodies and more, all subtly grounded in the classics of her childhood. She speaks many languages of music, has made them her own and invented more, setting herself free to fly into new dimensions. In “Saints and Angels” the melody seems to have upward motions like wings.

In July Victoria Banks was nominated by the CCMA for the categories “Female Artist of the Year” and “Songwriter of the year”. The CCMA Awards show will be broadcast from Edmonton, Alberta, on Sunday 12 September on CBC and CMT. According to the tour destinations on her website, she will be performing in Edmonton on the previous day.

Now I share with you what Victoria and an audience member wrote in Facebook about Saturday’s concert. First Victoria:

“Wow, what an amazing show tonight at the Gravenhurst Opera House! Thanks to my hometown crowd for making me feel so welcome!” 

And now Susan Penwarden from the audience:

“Thanks for the amazing concert tonight. You now officially have one more true fan my husband. You blew him away with your very last song. We both believe a true test of a singer’s ability is to sing with no back up and you passed with flying colours. We will definitely will be seeing you again! Thanks again. You made our hearts happy. 

Les and Sue

P.S. best of luck at the CCMA's”

Victoria Banks has an informative, user-friendly website, where you can find her music, tour details, journal, store for CDs and t-shirts, and her biography in written and video form. This video really drew me in with its warmth and brilliance. Hers is an attractive, tuneful site to enjoy, and to keep in touch with her and her career path as it gathers more and more glitter overlaying the gold of her life story. 

http://www.victoriabanks.net

Scroll down to see more reviews of the 2010 Summer, and earlier Seasons

Click on the link below to view future shows.

http://www.gravenhurstoperahouse.com/