The one-night-only big band experience

“It’s a one-night-only big band experience of listening to your favourite songs, swung,” says Cito, who is both one of the producers and the director. “Swinged? Swang? I’m trying to describe it in one sentence … ”

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Adam Howard, the musical director, steps in. “We’re all swingers in the Johannesburg Big Band and we’re proud of it – let me handle this,” he grins. “This is our third show of this sort at the Lyric Theatre with the Colab Network and what we like to do as a creative team is to try to package music around a theme. The last one was My Big Band Valentine and before that there was Swinging Christmas. Here it’s about our favourites. ‘Swing music’ is a very generic term, though, so let me give some definitions.

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“A Big Band is a bespoke 17-piece outfit. We have four trumpets, four trombones, five saxes and a four-piece rhythm section. And we’ve not even mentioned the singers yet. With this setup, we can encapsulate so many different styles of music. The singers with us this time are Tim Moloi and ChianoSky, who are wonderful.”

Moloi studied in the US, the home of swing. Did he gain any insight into the genre as a result?

“I grew up as the son of a pastor, so I was always exposed to gospel music,” Moloi says.

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“I regularly heard the music of Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and others – and loved it. Some years ago I started listening to it more intently, and then performing it. It was a style I grew into.”

Moloi is, generally speaking, an interpreter of the work of other writers. How does he choose the material that best suits his voice?

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“Having enjoyed the privilege of performing a great deal of this music, you get to know which tunes are your favourites and what makes most sense for you,” he says. “And fortunately, when we met to put this show together, it was a creative meeting of minds. In fact, the hardest thing was to bring the list down to a set we could fit into the show.”

Says Howard: “When you hear the word ‘swing’, your mind goes straight to songs like Mack The Knife and New York, New York. But I have 5 000 arrangements in my library – it isn’t just those famous songs.

Adam Howard will lead the 17-piece Johannesburg Big Band for My Favourite
Swings.

“We do Phil Collins’s Sussudio, for instance. He formed his own big band about 10 years ago, and this is his arrangement. It’s great pop. And there’s stuff from Adele and Amy Winehouse and others. We had to whittle it down to 20 choices.”

Adds Cito: “It was important to include some standards … so there’s a balance of tradition and new stuff. We’re trying to give it a timeless feel rather than a nostalgic feel, though it’s unavoidable.”

Picture: supplied