Duchess, Greatest Contemporary Jazz Vocal Ensemble, Claims Birdland Royalty

The vocal group Duchess has titled their new album “A Marvelous Party,” and indeed that it is. In the best tradition of jazz harmony trios and sister acts, they offer us the instruction, “Enjoy Yourself” and they also ask the burning question, “Are You Having Any Fun?” This is the way harmony groups are supposed to work in jazz and jazz-adjacent pop music. There’s a reason that the Boswell Sisters never sang “Strange Fruit” and the Andrews Sisters never did “Lush Life” — although in my head I can almost hear the Mills Brothers harmonizing on “MacArthur Park.” Somehow, it’s a stretch for multiple voice ensembles to express the darker emotions and the more serious feelings. An album by a vocal group is almost by definition a party of sorts.The other salient factor is that multiple-voice ensembles are perhaps the most difficult to maintain over the long haul; somehow even big bands are more manageable. For whatever reason, it’s easier for 15 musicians to get together and create new music than it is for three singers. There are big bands that make a new album every year or two, but Duchess hasn’t had a new release since the pandemic; this is actually their fourth album, which makes them the most enduring of contemporary jazz vocal ensembles, as well as, almost indisputedly, the greatest. “A Marvelous Party,” lives up to the legacy while breaking new ground. There’s one upbeat anthem after another, and I can’t imagine anyone not smiling throughout. This is especially prescient: we need to hear the message of “Are You Having Any Fun” perhaps even more now, in these dark times, than we did in 1939. Yet the album gives us new ways to have fun: “My Lucky Day,” which turns 100 this year, was introduced in “George White’s Scandals,” although most of us remember it from Judy Garland. Arranger-conductor Oded Lev-Ari provides a hard-driving biggish band behind them, with a brief trombone break and a guitar soloing in octaves a la Wes Montgomery. There’s also a Jon Hendricks “vocalese”-style chorus that includes the newly-written couplet, “Loving is my brand new motto / Laughing in staccato / I should play the lotto.”What’s very new here, at least in the literature of jazz vocal groups, is the use of spoken word, which helps the trio contend with this issue of whether ensemble voices can somehow be introspective. The title song, more fully titled “I Went to a Marvellous Party,” was written by Nöel Coward, who incorporates speech in such an innovative way as to anticipate Henry Higgins’s semi-spoken, semi-sung numbers in “My Fair Lady.” The music follows the rhythm of speech, and each of the three Duchesses — Amy Cervini, Hilary Gardner, and Melissa Stylianou — gets a mini-monologue wherein each recalls being simultaneously thrilled to death and bored to tears by the antics of various partygoers. Each reconciles their own personalties and tastes with Coward’s distinct language and cadences. They go into detail about asinine antics of each of the revelers and yet, in the end, gleefully admit that they “couldn’t have liked it more.”Peggy Lee’s iconic, “Is That All There Is?” combines the spoken and the sung perhaps even more adventurously. The piece sounds like Weill and Brecht in a doubles match with Guy and Carmen Lombardo. Again, each of the three gets a spoken passage, in addition to a chorus which they sang in harmony. Then-recovering rock & roll songwriter/ producers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller wrote these in deliberately old-fashioned waltz time to recreate the ambience of a vintage sweet band. The sing-song melody is effectively contrasted with spoken passages musing the implications of life and love, death and disappointment, not to mention clowns, elephants, and dancing bears.At 93, Mr. Stoller, whose score for this season’s “Beaches” on Broadway was better than it needed to be, is one of three living songwriters here, the others being Lee Adams (“Put on a Happy Face”), age 101, and Kat Edmonson. Ms. Edmonson is a talented young singer songwriter whose works deserve more attention and coverage, and her “Champagne” is funny and poignant, and sports a Mulligan-esque baritone sax solo by Owen Broder. “If That All There Is” gives us American songwriters emulating Weimar Berliners; conversely, “Danke Schoen” is German maestro Bert Kaempfert writing an American style big band swing number, which the trio imbues with an overwhelming sweetness.If anything, the album title is almost too on-the-nose. Between “Hey, Look Me Over,” a cheer-up show tune transmuted from march time to swingtime, and Dean Martin’s characteristic ode to insouciance, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” this party is considerably more marvelous (with or without the extra L in the songtitle) than even the one described by Sir Nöel. I couldn’t have liked it more.Duchess is appearing at Birdland Jazz Club on Sunday June 15.

Duchess, Greatest Contemporary Jazz Vocal Ensemble, Claims Birdland Royalty

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