THE Mood Indigo organisation sailed blithely into the consciousness of jazz lovers here last weekend, fashioning a show just a bit too long, replete with deathless standards written by the cream of jazz composers, and performed with a joyousness that made the evening quite a celebration.
Vocalist Joyce Davis and her musicians constitute a singularly distinctive combination, as expansive and mercurial as the sea they traverse in their sleek yachts, performing at exotic venues and for discerning audiences.
The Mood Indigo programme on the lawns of Castellani House is one with which the jazz lover could not find fault. From Handy’s St. Louis Blues, through Hoagy Carmichael’s Georgia and Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll, to Mercer and Arlen’s Blues In The Night and Rodgers and Hart’s Blue Moon, the musicians offered a nostalgic feast from the era when lyrics were not mindless and when the melody was the thing, with the rhythm complementary.
Errol Garner’s Misty, Delange’s Moonglow, Arlen’s Stormy Weather and Howard’s Fly Me To the Moon brought back memories with a rush, transporting the jazz lovers clustered on the lawn at Castellani House back to good old days.
As for the performers in the Mood Indigo band, they are priceless. Their ensemble work is competent enough, but it is when they venture into solo passages, improvising with luscious spontaneity on the too well-remembered melodies, that they really shine.
Vocalist Davis is full-voiced and most exciting when scatting and evoking shades of Al Jolson with Woods’ When The Red Red Robin Comes Bob Come Bob Bob Bobbing Along. She is very rightly brash with Arlen’s Blues In The Night, though her reading of Carmichael’s Georgia is perhaps just a bit too harsh to mesh with the sentiments intended by the song-writer.
She manages Ellington’s It Don’t Mean A Thing with an infectious vitality, while with Billie Holiday’s God Bless The Child she shapes the blues idiom into a haunting work that captures the dark experiences of the great jazz singer.
Towards the end of the first half of the concert, Davis teamed up with Ruth Osman as they romped through Gershwin’s Summertime, a pleasant excursion that conjured up visions of the Black American experience so surprisingly captured by the White American composers, George and Ira Gershwin.
Trumpeter David Davis, and husband of the Mood Indigo vocalist, sprang a big surprise as he ventured with his sure technique into his very own version of Herman’s Hello Dolly, with shades of Satchmo, an ebullient performance which he thoroughly enjoyed.
In the Mood Indigo Band, that most colourful of all jazz instruments, the saxophone, is in the capable hands of Trinidad’s Anthony Woodroffe. When he is faithful to the melody, he coaxes honeyed notes from his instrument, and the beautiful songs that constitute the Mood Indigo repertoire make this an experience more than worthwhile. But then Woodroffe sallies into improvisation and the concert sparkles with inventiveness and daring.
Just as efficient as saxophonist Woodroffe is flautist Anthony Adams. Among the brash, intrusive instruments of the jazz band, the modest flute is sometimes cowed and shifted to the side-lines. So it is to hold his own the flautist has to be larger than life. Adams is possessed of this criterion to a remarkable degree. His flights of fantasy on the flute are filigreed and intelligent, with never a sour note, and he is unafraid to belt out staccato passages, a technique he gets away with just because he is so good.
Add to all this the mature, strident technique of Guyanese guitarist Herbie Marshall, and the showy rhythms of drummer Trinidadian Winston Matthew, and the Mood Indigo becomes an organisation to be enjoyed again and again, sure-fire entertainers on a scene where much of what passes for good music is anything but.