The hit formula of 2014’s Battle of the Bands Prom returned this year with powerful jazz orchestras led by Guy Barker and Winston Rollins, and fronted by vocalist and big band fan Clare Teal, in a breathless race through the chronology of swing, the pop music of the 1930s and 40s.
The definition of the art was mostly narrowly focused on commercial dance music, taking off on the 1935 Palomar Ballroom gig when Benny Goodman’s smoothly oiled band went the era’s version of viral, before receding barely 15 years later. Four Goodman hits were featured, with eight others from white bandleaders Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, Charlie Barnet, Harry James, Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw – so those African American orchestral jazz giants Count Basie and the poetic Duke Ellington, barely made the show’s 24-piece setlist. Nonetheless, Guy Barker’s fine arrangement of West End Blues (Louis Armstrong’s astonishing trumpet phrasing being a key inspiration for swing composition) made a bluesily earthy opener, while Winston Rollins’s breakneck vignette of the Chick Webb band in dancefloor action, Jamie Davis’s evocation of Billy Eckstine’s silky baritone voice, and Barker’s subtle visit to Casa Loma Orchestra’s Smoke Rings were highlights of a first half sometimes becalmed by swing’s rhythmic habits.
The second half, however, was a riot – with both bands fully warmed up, the work of great 1930s arrangers like Sy Oliver highlighted (notably on Tommy Dorsey’s Opus One), and big individual moments. Harry James’s Trumpet Blues and Cantabile sounded like rock’n’roll, a Benny Goodman small-band tribute featured Alan Barnes’s sleek clarinet and James Pearson’s thundering stride piano on Handful of Keys, and a fervently soulful bow to Billie Holiday’s Lover Man came from the timelessly magnificent singer Elaine Delmar. The brash, wide-grin brass shouts and drum fanfares of Sing, Sing, Sing brought all the singers – including the Promunards vocal chorus – onstage, and Barker’s roaring six-themed medley (including In The Mood, One O’Clock Jump and Flying Home) set the promenaders gratefully hopping.
