Kay Cee Rider
I Love My Baby
When The Saints Go Marching In
Olga
The Old Rugged Cross
Bye & Bye
Pound Of Blues
When You And I Were Young Maggie Dear
Just A Closer Walk With Thee
Bourbon Street Parade
Savoy Blues
Lonesome Road
The Sheik Of Araby
Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey
You Took Advantage Of Me
Sweet Sue
Moonshine Man
You Rascal You
Trombone Cholly
Lawdy Lawdy Blues
Bugle Boy March
Pretty Baby
Majorca
Indiana
New Orleans Hula
St. Phillip Street Breakdown
Georgia Grind
Rockin’ In Rhythm
My Old Kentucky Home
Rent Party Blues
Careless Love
Strange Things Happen Every Day
Mama Don’t Allow
Lake continues its fine work in systematic reclamation
of the Barber band’s recordings. 1957 was a lean year in the studios
but the surviving recordings happily attest to the brightly swinging,
tightly arranged Catholicism of tune selection; not too many bands
of the time, for example, sought out the King Oliver-Dave Nelson song
Olga.
Of the selection the expected When the Saints
lasts an extended six minutes. Monty Sunshine pays obeisance to George
Lewis with a gently, reverentially phrased The Old Rugged Cross.
But the band always truffled for some jump classics and it turns
in a funky workout on Pound Of Blues where trumpeter Pat Halcox
is at his fiery best. His work with the mute is finely exemplified
on Just A Closer Walk With Thee, its tempo doubling always
engaging. Ottilie Patterson’s vocals, as ever, add an authentic burnish.
The Birmingham Town Hall concert of January 1958 is included. Hear
Sunshine’s driving clarinet on Savoy Blues where Barber takes
an echt Kid Ory solo. Patterson is exuberant on Lonesome Road the
excellence of which is enhanced by the simple but effective arrangement.
Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey is a feature for Sunshine and
here Dick Smith’s throbbing bass line offers hugely encouraging support.
Halcox takes a cadenza in You Took Advantage Of Me richly redolent
of Louis. In fact every track offers little felicities of one kind
or another. The potential for comedy is not spurned, either, as Patterson
demonstrates in that old pleaser, Moonshine Man.
The Dome, Brighton, concert of 1958 reinforces just
how pervasively beneficial was the influence of Wilbur de Paris’s
band on Barber. This plurality of approach represented stylistic plasticity
of a welcome kind, when bands were ploughing over-reverential or academic
furrows on the British scene. Barber’s band meanwhile managed to accommodate
the gutsy tailgate of Ory, the floating fragility of George Lewis,
the tensile driving trumpet of post-Armstrong derived players and
the rhythmic dynamism of de Paris. At its very best the band built
up an incontrovertible head of steam. Even now things such as Georgia
Grind and Rockin’ In Rhythm pack a real punch and make
for exciting listening.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
LAKE
LACD 268 [77:19 + 78:35]
