Music / jazz swing celestine bruce ilett
Live review: When Ella Met Frank
It’s unlikely that anyone in the near capacity audience for this concert would have needed to be told who Ella and Frank were, and neither would they have been amazed to discover the an evening of swing jazz was on the cards. They might, however, have found the sheer quality of the musicianship on offer a pleasant surprise as this benefit for next year’s Bristol International Jazz & Blues Festival was far from the ‘cruise ship’ league of easy listening entertainment that might have been feared. The evocation of a legendary Fitzgerald/Sinatra album had its share of predictability in the set list, at least, with Denny Ilett giving Come Fly With Me, One For my Baby, Fly Me To The Moon and That’s Why The Lady Is a Tramp all the Frankish affectation they deserved, but there were also unexpected pleasures. You’re Getting To Be A habit With Me, for instance, with the measured ambiguity of Denny’s lyric and a supersweet clarinet solo from Ben Waghorn or a smoking St Louis Blues which offered a similar duet between Celestine Walcott-Gordon’s dirty barrelhouse vocals and Craig Crofton’s fingerlicking sax. Misty saw Celestine take the pace right down (despite her claim that she only had two speeds “medium and mediumer”) leaving Jonny Bruce’s trumpet to evoke the early Dizzy Gilaespie over Dan Moore’s perfectly judged piano sketch. It was all classy stuff, the eight piece band filling out to Basie-like proportions on some arrangements while slimming down to a spacious trio for others. Naturally much hung on the two vocalists, however, and the results probably reflected the strengths and weaknesses of their role models: Ilett’s Frank Sinatra had bags of style over a shallow emotional range, while Walcott-Gordon’s Ella Fitzgerald inhabited each song and wrenched every human nuance from it. On balance it had to be Celestine’s night, clinched by a reading of ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’ that shouldn’t have left many dry eyes in the house. It was a showstopping performance that offered further proof (if it were needed) of quite what an exceptional singer she is.
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