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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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GEORGIE FAME AND THE BLUE FLAMES
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Ronnie
Scott’s, London
March
7th 2009
It’s
a full house at Ronnie Scott’s as a trim
and dapper Georgie
Fame takes to the stage for the first
show of the evening. It’s the end of a seven-day
residency – “it’s been a long
week – and now all we have to do is blow
our brains out for ninety minutes – twice”.
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| Fact
of the matter is that Fame and his band were probably
holding a little in reserve for the second set (veteran
saxophonist Alan
Skidmore was certainly trying to avoid bleeding
lips so early in the evening), but no-one in the
audience was going to complain about that. Just
like Ronnie Scott’s (this year celebrating
a fiftieth birthday), where he’s been playing
an annual residency for four decades, Fame is a
British jazz institution. And this early Saturday
evening audience – birthdays, anniversaries,
you name it, they’re celebrating it - are
looking for the sort of entertainment that Fame
and his band are guaranteed to deliver. |
| And
it’s not just music, fantastic solos almost
casually thrown out with the sort of charming insouciance
that one might expect from British jazz musicians,
that we get. We are, after all, in the presence
of one of the great personalities of UK music. Someone
whose list of collaborators reads like a who’s
who of jazz, R&B (as we used to call it) and
even rock. Fame gently reminds us of his rank after
song number two, ‘Get on the right track baby’.
He leans forward over the keyboard of his Hammond
organ (Fame, it is claimed, was among the first
British musicians to adopt the Hammond) , and seems
to manage to catch the eye of everyone (even those
looking at his back) in the audience. |
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| He
speaks with the authority of a benevolent uncle
who brooks no contradiction. “Now, I personally
believe that Ray Charles’ popularity in Europe
was solely down to Eddie Cochran, who brought his
love of Charles’ music to England when he
toured here in 1960. That of course was the infamous
tour when he died in a car-crash just outside Chippenham.
I was his 16- year-old piano player”. There’s
no bullshit here: Fame, whose face and grey hair
may give away the years, but whose voice is astonishingly
timeless, is the real thing, and he oozes an effortless
coolness. |
| And
who wouldn’t be cool with a band like this?
Fame’s two sons, Tristan and James Powell,
are on guitar and drums. Alec
Dankworth, of the great jazz dynasty, is on
bass. Anthony Kerr is playing vibraphone, Guy
Barker trumpet, and Skidmore, apparently unencumbered
by a bandaged hand, saxophone. It’s a band
that’s been playing together for 15 years
or more. There are more reminiscences from Fame:
in “the obituary section” he plays a
song he wrote for the recently-deceased Blossom
Dearie, who had penned one for him after seeing
him perform for the first time in the 1960s, and
also recalls composer Steve Gray, who died last
year. “This song needs an obituary too”,
he says, before introducing ‘Yeah yeah’,
his chart hit. |
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| Skidmore
rips his way through a solo on ‘Birdy birdy’
(“it’s as close to rock and roll as
I can get these days”). And with his own Mose
Allisonesque lyrics Fame sings some new songs –
‘All I know’, an exploration of the
memory loss that comes with advancing age, and ‘Guantánamo
by the sea’, thoughts prompted by a frustrating
attempt to get a work permit at short notice to
play at New York’s Blue Note Club. |
| This
is a more than satisfactory performance. The playing
is outstanding, the band all in equally good humour.
And it’s not that we haven’t seen Fame
perform before, by himself and with Van Morrison,
it’s just that he simply belongs here –
‘forty years at Ronnie Scott’s and nothing
changes’ he complains as he struggles to adjust
the piano stool. He is, as we sometimes say, ‘in
with the bricks’. So if you visit London,
and get a chance to see him at Scott’s, then
don’t hesitate to get a ticket, whatever the
cost. - Nick Morgan |
| Listen:
a nice and famous old one by Georgie Fame
and the Blue Fames, Sitting
in the park (1966) |
Check
the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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There's nothing more down there... |
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