Word: scats
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Brother Blue followed with his traditional invocation, a characteristically enchanting melange of narrative poetry and scat with saxophone accompaniment by Don Braden, who backed up many of the singers in this show...
Roland Tec's music, composed for this production, tends to work against the play's attempt to evoke '20s Chicago. Though jazzy, it sounds too much like '40s bebop. The scat singing between scenes is clearly not spontaneous. Not that Tec's music should sound like frequent Brecht collaborator Kurt Weill's, but it adds little and even detracts from the atmosphere...
What is there to be heard is a state-of-the-art dance record. Jackson's lyrics combine sometimes glancing felicity ("Your talk is cheap/ You're not a man/ You're throwin' stones/ To hide your hands") with scat-style facility. There is a great singer at work here, doing vocal stunts on tracks like Dirty Diana or Speed Demon that are as nimble and fanciful as any of his dance steps. Man in the Mirror, a ballad of confession and resolution, is more than just a vocal turn. It is a remarkable dramatic performance -- intense, direct and unadorned...
...feel the heat with somebody," and the vocal scorches. The rest of the album -- a mixture of party songs and love songs -- displays its star's subtler readings, greater vocal nuance, more dynamism and control. On the jazzy ballad Just the Lonely Talking, she eases into an adventurous scat duet with an alto sax. But she can still sing it straight and sweet, as in Michael Masser's romantic elegy Didn't We Almost Have It All, an instant standard with a spiraling melodic line...
...cooks, however, the broth is delicious. From the opening, on- your-toes Harlem Scat, through the kick-up-your-heels flapper dance of The Hairdo Hop, past the wild jungle dance of Stix, round the sultry, smoky bend of A Blues for Two Women and back home to Harlem for the finale, Queenie Pie is unmistakably the work of the grand Duke. In the pit, the Duke Ellington Orchestra steps through the score's uptown opulence with high style, trumpets growling and keyboards swinging, while onstage, members of Director-Choreograp her Garth Fagan's Bucket Dance Theater juke and okeydoke...