Cleo's craft delights

Press, 23 October 1976, Page 6

Cleo's craft delights

This is not a review of the Cleo Laine-John Dankworth concert at the Christchurch Town Hall last evening. This is an advertisement.

Money is not a prerequisite for an advertisement. An advertisement serves only to inform. This is simple notice that last evening two talented musicians, with help from three others equally endowed, amazed, dazzled, and totally enthralled what had been initially a rather apathetic audience. Songs are Cleo’s craft, audiences her material. In the three years since she first visited Christchurch, and in the long harder years since the 19505, this husband and wife team have refined their techniques, concentrated on the best, modified the appropriate, and when necessary created material to dazzle audiences around the world.

They do it well. The concert opened, inap-

propriately, with pianist and sometime fiddler Paul Hart fiddling with his electric piano while Dankworth blew “We’ve Only Just Begun.” The quartet, completed by Darcy Wright, bass, and Alan Turnbull, drums, played a Dankworth opus, “Kite Flight,” which featured Hart. Cleo then emerged wearing one of her beautiful chiffon full-sleeved frocks. The first was blue, the second orange. “How Long Has This Been Going On?” she asked her audience. Little response. “Come Back To Me” she pleaded. The audience knew this would not be an easy night. She leaned on them with “Streets of London,” and, from the applause, knew she had them. Then came the tricks —the techniques that success allows. Cleo flowed around the stage, always commanding, but sharing her light (when

the spots allowed) with the musicians. The audience was spellbound. She did her duets with John, sang again (and just as well) the young, old and Cockney versions of “Mad About the Boy,” an entertaining set by Shakespeare, Spike Milligan, and W. H. Auden, and “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”

The audience gave the group several prolonged encores, and Cleo sang a beautiful version of “Send in the Clowns” and left on “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.”

Hart. Wright, and Turnbull added greatly to the music, the latter being one of the most sympathetic rhythm players one could wish for.

The point of all this—Cleo and John are on again tonight. Be there.