Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘BBC Concert Orchestra’

Jul 16

49 Comments

Northern Soul at the Albert Hall

The spirits of Tobi Legend, Tony Clarke, Sandi Sheldon, Eddie Holman, Bobby Paris, Judy Street, Shane Martin, Dana Valery and other heroes of Northern Soul inhabited the Royal Albert Hall last night. Goodness knows what they would have made of the sight and sound of 5,000 people acclaiming performances of their songs in the second concert of the 2023 BBC Proms season.

To recreate 30 Northern Soul favourites with the BBC Concert Orchestra in such formal surroundings seemed like an endeavour fraught with risk. In fact it was an unmitigated triumph, for which enormous credit goes to the co-curators, the writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie and the arranger Joe Duddell, as well as the half-dozen singers recruited to attempt the task.

The evening started with the ebullient Brendan Reilly delivering the MVPs’ “Turning My Heartbeat Up” and Dobie Gray’s “Out on the Floor”, setting the mood while reassuring the audience that the performances would both idiomatically accurate and true to the music’s spirit. It ended two hours later with all six singers taking turns to lead the audience in a wonderful version of Frank Wilson’s “Do I Love You (Deed I Do)”, the song that most perfectly captures the pure exhilaration of Northern Soul.

But there are many more shades to this music, as we heard as Frida Touray elegantly interpreted Rita and the Tiaras’ sublime “Gone With the Wind Is My Love” and Little Anthony and the Imperials’ sophisticated “Better Use Your Head”, in Nick Shirm’s elastic delivery of Shane Martin’s “I Need You”, Bobby Paris’s “Night Owl” and Jimmy Beaumont’s “I Never Loved Her Anyway”, in Natalie Palmer’s lively reading of Dana Valery’s “You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies” and Judy Street’s “What Can I Do”, in Darrell Smith’s stylish version of Ray Pollard’s “The Drifter”, and in Vula Malinga’s superb account of Gladys Knight’s gospel-driven “No One Can Love You More”. Reilly had just the voice for both the Trammps’ “Hold Back the Night” and the Carstairs’ “It Really Hurts Me Girl”.

As each singer took their solo turn, the others provided beautifully judged backing vocals. Gradually the orchestra, conducted by Edwin Outwater, came into its own, with Duddell and Fiona Brice providing the meticulously detailed arrangements: the strings soared, the brass and reeds thickened the sound. The rhythm section — Andy Vinter (piano), Alasdair Malloy (vibes), Pete Callard (guitar), Steve Pearce (bass guitar), Mike Smith (drums), Steve Whibley and Julian Poole (percussion) — provided the unstoppable momentum. Vibraphone and baritone saxophone, the keys to so many Motown-influenced Northern Soul favourites, were present and correct, while the guitarist chopped chords on the backbeat as the idiom demanded. The whole sound was mixed and balanced perfectly. A couple of times the singers stepped aside, allowing the orchestra to perform two of the backing tracks — “Sliced Tomatoes” and a magnificent “Exus Trek” — that were such an important part of the scene.

Darrell Smith, perfectly turned out in a brown Tonik suit, supplied soaring drama that stole the show late on with the Four Seasons’ “The Night”, the Albert Hall’s lighting technicians bathing the ecstatic throng in something approaching a mirror-ball effect. Then came the famous trio of songs with which the DJs at Wigan Casino closed their all-nighters: Dean Parrish’s “I’m on My Way”, Jimmy Radcliffe’s “Long After Tonight Is All Over” and Tobi Legend’s “Time Will Pass You By”, which between them summon all the emotions its audience continues to draw from this music: optimism and determination, but also the layer of aching sadness beneath the euphoria. All the complicated feelings of youth, captured in these seemingly disposable but resolutely enduring songs.

Maconie’s introduction had drawn cheers for his mentions of Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, Blackpool Mecca, Wigan Casino, Stoke’s Golden Torch and Bolton’s Va Va Club. This was a communal rite, a meeting of the clans, the reunion of a family in an alien setting that turned out to be a home from home. It was something very precious. I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed it.

* You can hear BBC Prom 2: Northern Soul on BBC Sounds for the next 29 days. You can see it on BBC2 on 26 August and hear it again on BBC Radio 6 Music on 9 September.

Nov 22

5 Comments

London Jazz Festival 5: Yazz Ahmed

Given the times we’re in, it was pretty wonderful to witness the scale of this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, which shows no sign of losing its ambition under its new artistic director, Pelin Opcin. Typical of its scope was last night’s meeting of the trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, under the title Fusing Forces.

In recent years Ahmed has been pursuing a strand of thought which blends her jazz training at the Guildhall with an exploration of the music of Bahrain, where she lived until she was nine. Two striking albums, La Saboteuse and Polyhymnia, gave evidence of her success, and last night’s project took the process a stage further. With the help of arrangers including Noel Langley and Tim Garland, her compositions were enhanced by the use of the orchestra’s resources, under the empathetic baton of Bramwell Tovey.

Ahmed’s exceptionally gifted quintet — completed by Ralph Wyld on vibes, Dave Manington on bass guitar, Martin France on drums and the percussionist Corrina Silvester — was positioned across the front of the stage, separated from the orchestra by a perspex barrier, presumably for reasons of acoustic separation (the concert was being recorded for radio). But, thanks to Tovey and the sound engineers, there was no separation of thought or action. The calibre of the writing ensured that both elements were often perfectly integrated into a single organism, with no sense of excess baggage or impediment on the occasions when the orchestra simply added its weight to the smaller group.

The most striking of the compositions were those that brought Middle Eastern patterns and modes into the music, such as “A Paradise in the Hold” (inspired by the songs of Bahraini pearl divers) and “Al Emadi”, with their distant echoes of the Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaboration on “Solea” from Sketches of Spain. The blend sounded completely organic, the rhythmic drive providing a fine setting for inventive solos by Wyld, who was heavily featured, and Ahmed herself, who made use of reverb and other electronic effects to emphasise the legato quality of her playing but sounded even more impressive when she allowed the natural qualities of the flugelhorn to be the vehicle for her tone and ideas.

Other interesting Ahmed compositions included “A Shoal of Souls”, dedicated to refugees who lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean in small craft, in which Garland’s chart made dramatic use of tubular bells and timpani against the strings, and “2857”, inspired by Rosa Parks, its title using the number of the bus on which she refused to give up her seat to a white customer in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, the two-part piece moving from sombre reflection to urgent hustle.

The programme also included short pieces by Jessie Montgomery (a fantasy on “The Star-Spangled Banner”) and Judith Weir (gentle nightmusic). At Ahmed’s behest, the orchestra’s strings played Arvo Pärt’s “Silouans Song”, a compositions of great loveliness that might have resulted from Vaughan Williams visiting a Baltic monastery in winter. All in all, an absorbing evening which fully justified the audience’s prolonged ovation.

* Fusing Forces is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow night (Tuesday 23 November) from 7.30-10pm.