Tonight’s programme will include from Octavia: Edwin Fawcett’s lovely Magnificat with close harmonies, perhaps reminding us of the Detroit Supremes (though Fawcett works in London).
My own contributions (as another English ‘Soul’ composer) include a version of the Ave Maria - Be Glad Mary (with hints of my misspent youth in jazz record clubs in the early 1960’s) and the more raunchy Soul Queen - a new look at the Salve Regina. This hammers away at the very same chords that excited Debussy 100 years ago and then inflamed Miles Davis and the band leaders of the 60’s to create the new BeBop Jazz that replaced the traditional jazz of the 30s and 40s. Discerning listeners will spot the ‘homage’ to my favourite bass players and pianists. But our special offering is a version of the classic You are the Living Word, from Fred Hammond’s Radical for Christ Album produced as recently as 2000; yet already it seems timeless - 14,000 hits on U tube and rising.
Towering Angels will offer from the Appalachians: O sing to me of Heaven, a piece that reminds us that for poor whites the agonies of this life were worth it for the joy of the next; and from the ‘Heavenly Gospel Quartet’ of Nashville: Go ye prodigal, which shows that, like the poor whites, the poor blacks too were anxious for the reward when they ‘go back home’. At some point we hope to feature Will Tamblyn in a couple of numbers made popular by the Rat Pack and more recently by Michael Bublé, Jamie Cullen and Diana Krall – Fly me to the Moon (Bart Howard’s wonderful theme song to the 1954 movie Once around) and van Heusen’s soaring Come fly with me of 1958.
We may join forces and give you Mary’s Canticle (another version of the Magnificat,) written in 1993 by the great Leon Roberts, classically trained African American Roman Catholic composer of Gospel and Soul so tragically taken from the world by cancer at the age of 36. And if there is time, People get Ready, written 1964, recorded Chicago 1965 by the Impressions, and another great, Curtis Mayfield, the creator of ‘funky soul’ who died in 1999 after a long illness following paralysis in 1990 after an accident on stage when a lighting rig fell on him during a performance.
