“A Night at the Cotton Club” with Seattle Symphony is performed again tonight at 8 p.m.; Saturday, June 8, at 2 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday, June 9, at 2 p.m.
Jeff Tyzik took over the Seattle Symphony’s Pops series after Marvin Hamlisch’s sudden death last summer, and to all of us who knew and loved Hamlisch’s approach to popular music, it felt the genre would never be the same. He was a perfect person to bring together the classical music world and the popular one, his concerts lively, funny and always personal.
Enter Tyzik, hired last fall to take Hamlisch’s place here as principal pops conductor in a stroke of genius by the Seattle Symphony—and luck, as Tyzik is a very busy man in huge demand. He’s also a brave one, as Hamlisch’s shoes are big ones to fill.
No, he’s not Hamlisch. He’s Tyzik, and he has his own way of creating a pops concert.
Thursday’s concert, the first of five this weeked at Benaroya Hall, pulsed with energy from beginning to end. Four gifted soloists joined the Seattle Symphony, which included a large augmented brass section with five saxophone players. Robert Breithaupt took on the all important drums, and had one prominent solo in Ella Fitzgerald’s “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie.”
On the front of the stage, trumpeter and vocalist Byron Stripling raised his instrument in one marvellous melody and riff after another, his sound bright and smooth as silk no matter where in the range he was. Then he’d tuck it under his arm and sing. Sometimes he was joined by vocalist Carmen Bradford as in Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and at others by tap dancer and vocalist, Ted Louis Levy, who would do astonishing things with his feet until one got almost dizzy watching his feet, and then stop and sing, amazingly, with enough breath on top of that much energy expended.
The three of them had a routine smoothly dovetailed with comedic moments.
At one moment, Levy gave a dazzling display of footwork and singing in O’Flynn/Meskill and Rich’s “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!” only to be followed by Stripling offering to explain the importance of rhythm, in “Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” to the audience’s great amusement.
All through this program, the heritage of the great Cotton Club entertainers was manifest, with works by luminaries such as Harold Arlen, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, W.C. Handy, and more as well as those earlier mentioned. As well, the performers all had credentials going back through a generation or two to that artistically seminal club. Stripling was 17 and already playing with the Count Basie Orchestra when Bradford was hired by the Count at the age of 12. Both have gone on to fine careers as has Levy, a reminder of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.
Tyzik, who keeps a much lower profile than Hamlisch, made all the arrangements of the works on the program and kept the orchestra in perfect sync with itself and the soloists. Many of the sax and trombone players had their moments in the spotlight, and my only quibble would have been that when the clarinetists had their solos, it was hard to hear them over the orchestra. Indeed sometimes I couldn’t hear the words sung by the soloists because of the volume of sound from the instrumentalists. But these were small things in a highly enjoyable performance.