[Dixielandjazz] Cotton Club Parade - Reviewed

[Stephen G Barbone]

A Historic Harlem Hothouse Swings Again (With a Modern Orchestra)

By STEPHEN HOLDEN - NY TIMES - Nov 20, 2011

Leading the list of pleasures to be savored in “Cotton Club Parade,” a  
thrilling 90-minute celebration of that famous Harlem nightclub in the  
Duke Ellington years (1927-31) at City Center, is the sound of the  
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. At the show’s  
opening-night performance on Friday, this peerless ensemble created by  
Mr. Marsalis made period jazz come to life with a focused intensity  
and rhythmic savvy that left me open-mouthed with wonder.
“So this is swing,” I marveled to myself as the orchestra glided from  
one number to the next. “Now I really know how hot it can be, how  
sultry and insinuating, how proudly strutting and how funny and  
irresistibly danceable. Maybe ‘period jazz’ is the wrong term.”

The orchestra finds syncopation within syncopation in the same way  
that Michael Jackson’s moonwalk implied uncountable rhythm, a kind of  
airborne strut or skid borne on a half-skipped beat. The music is so  
vivid and colorful it conjures vintage group photographs taken in  
Upper Manhattan; horns chatter, laugh and cry as they carry on an  
excited town hall meeting about Harlem life so many years ago. The  
spirit is defiantly optimistic. It reminded me of how the often-paired  
words “Ellington” and “elegant” go together — elegant meaning  
extravagantly refined but idiosyncratic.

Acclaimed Broadway revues of vintage African-American music like  
“Sophisticated Ladies,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and “Black and Blue” have  
had many virtues. But none have had a pit band to match Mr. Marsalis’s  
in conveying a communal vitality.

The song-and-dance elements of this swift, fluent re-imagining of a  
typical Cotton Club revue, conceived by Jack Viertel and directed and  
choreographed by Warren Carlyle (“Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway”; the  
“Follies” revival), are as viscerally buoyant as the orchestra. The  
program is a canny mixture of period standards (“I Can’t Give You  
Anything but Love,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Ill Wind,”  
“Stormy Weather”) and orchestral pieces (“Braggin’ in Brass,” “The  
Mooche,” “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” “Cotton Club Stomp”), many transcribed  
by David Berger from Ellington’s original arrangements.

The revue’s solution to the debatable issue of caricature and at what  
point a broad performance becomes a demeaning minstrel-show parody is  
to rein in the extremes. But it is in no way sedate. If the show has  
no Nell Carter or Ruth Brown, it does have Adriane Lenox, who delivers  
the Sippie Wallace advice song “Women Be Wise” (popularized in the  
1970s by Bonnie Raitt) with a knowing tang, and Carla Cook, who  
doesn’t oversalt “The Gal From Joe’s.” Ellington’s wordless “Creole  
Love Song,” crooned by Carmen Ruby Floyd, has an eerie, supernatural  
beauty.

Mr. Carlyle’s clean choreography connects variations of the Charleston  
with jitterbugging and a little break-dancing to suggest the  
continuity of styles without insisting on it. A corps of excellent tap  
dancers flow on and off the stage in euphoric numbers that efficiently  
use balloons and a small movable staircase.

“Cotton Club Parade,” whose minimal spoken text is adapted from  
Langston Hughes, is, finally, not about star turns, although one  
number, “Tap Mathematician,” a dance solo choreographed and executed  
by Jared Grimes, brought down the house.

So is the show Broadway-ready in its present form? Almost. But if it  
is to enjoy a longer life, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra,  
intact and undiluted — not some pickup band — must remain the  
foundation.

“Cotton Club Parade” runs through Tuesday at City Center, 131 West  
55th Street, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org or jalc.org.