[Dixielandjazz] Judy Carmichael reviewed -- von Evening Standard, March 10, 2014

[Robert Ringwald]

Judy Carmichael, The Crazy Coqs
by Jack Massarik
London Evening Standard, March 10, 2014
The best possible choice to launch this cabaret venue's new season of after-hours
jazz was undoubtedly Judy Carmichael. A slim Californian with a bubbly blonde perm
and dazzling smile, she is the undisputed queen of stride piano, a two-fisted art
born at about the same time as this beautiful room.
Just off Piccadilly Circus and originally part of the Regent Palace Hotel, it's a
circular subterranean space inlaid with mirrors and stainless steel, an Art Deco
ambience that recalls the days when Duke Ellington and Fats Waller steamed across
the Atlantic to entertain London's pre-war glitterati.
In those days jazz fans liked to recognise the tune the band was playing and happily
Judy still does. From the first brisk bars of I Found a New Baby, she had the crowded
room in the palm of her remarkably deft hands.
While the right handled the melody line and solos, the left played walking bass on
beats one and three and chordal backbeats on two and four. A one-woman band, in other
words, whose apparently effortless to-and-fro transit of the left forearm was poetry
in motion.
Judy also sang a few numbers by Fats Waller, Benny Goodman and Cole Porter and could
obviously work alone but guitarist Martin Wheatley added bite to I Got Rhythm, You're
Driving Me Crazy and Love is Just Around the Corner, songs almost exactly as old
his vintage 1936 Gibson acoustic.
"I can't believe how warm it is here," quipped Judy at the end of her second set.
"I'll be in New York and Chicago next week and I'll be telling them that I took a
sunshine break in London."
-30


-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

On why he no longer went to Ruggeri's, a St. Louis restaurant:
"Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."
-Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra