Swing band finally gets a chance to shine
The little big band that rarely gigs had its first gig of the year at the North Park Ice Rink on Thursday night. A full stable of dancers turned out, lining the sides between numbers.
In February, I wrote about Swingtet 8, thinking that readers would find it interesting, even appealing, that a group of musicians would be committed to rehearsing monthly regardless of whether they got gigs.
It doesn’t hurt to be primed in case a gig comes along, though, and they were primed that night, set up in a big room where skaters normally assemble before hitting the ice.
Lockers lined a wall behind the band, the carpet had that indooroutdoor look and the room did no favors for the acoustics, but Swingtet 8 swung, and so did at least a third of the people who turned out.
It was the Cole Porter tribute that Joe Lagnese had planned for, having arranged some 20 of his songs in 2018, hoping for an opportunity.
Most people of a certain age can hum Cole Porter’s tunes, even sing the words.
“In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows ... anything goes!”
“Anything Goes,” from the musical by the same name, in 1934, was all about how the world has gone mad today, how good’s bad today, how black’s white today, how day’s night today — kind of the way many feel today.
But swing doesn’t sound as timeless as Porter’s lyrics. It sounds of its time, and few people are exposed to it now, which explains why gigs are few.
A community of ballroom dancers scours public schedules for opportunities to hit the dance floor, and in this case, a group that is plugged into the Murrysville dance studio of Luanne and Joe O’Brien added this gig to its options.
“You have to Google it,” Luanne O’Brien said, “but believe it or not, we find them weekly.”
The first dancers on the floor, the O’Briens, grabbed eyes, she in a red dress that twirled, he in pinstriped pants and suspenders, reed thin, beaming, gliding, swirling, eliciting a nod and a smile from Mr. Lagnese, who thanked them afterward for dancing.
“I lived in that era, when it was popular,” Mr. Lagnese said.
But wait, there’s more! When the band landed squarely on the first note of “You Do Something To Me,” dancers flooded the floor. The O’Briens had merely greased the wheels.
Through “Love for Sale,” “Night and Day,” “Begin the Beguine,” dancers came and went, some starting awkwardly with tight faces, only to loosen quickly and start smiling. Some people were actually beaming.
The O’Briens would split up and act as scouts, each taking less confident dancers to encourage through a song. Like all people who love, love, love something, they want to hook others on the feeling.
In the audience, I noticed that I was beaming at the dancers, and it was the band I was there for.
Swingtet 8 — five horns, three rhythm and a singer — is half the size of a traditional swing band of 16 instruments, but the players make Mr. Lagnese’s arrangements sound bigger, for instance, when the trombone score is written to complement the saxophones for several bars.
The players include retired musicians, people still working, most in fields unrelated to music. But they all have played most of their lives with multiple bands.
Mr. Lagnese usually plays alto sax but said he can’t play and narrate at the same time, so he got Ray DeFade to sub for him as he emceed. Mr. Lagnese describes musicals for which Porter wrote the songs, adding humor and highlights. He explained that “cocaine” was once removed from the lyrics to “I Get a Kick Out of You” — when the song left Broadway for the heartland, those measures were restructured to avoid awkward efforts to find an apt word to rhyme with cocaine — and subsequently restored.
Toward the end of one song, as their fellow dancers stood on the sidelines, the women shaking their heads, the men grinning, the O’Briens began a gliding, skipping run in an oval around the dance floor, and when the band nailed the ending, the audience cheered.
Swingtet 8 has one more gig scheduled so far, Aug. 17 at Penn’s Colony.