Christmas big band sounds in Worthing and Southampton
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The 32-piece Down for the Count Orchestra, under the baton of conductor Mike Paul-Smith, will be at Worthing’s Assembly Hall on Saturday, December 21 (tickets on 01903 206206) with a special Christmas edition. They are also playing Turner Sims, Southampton on Sunday, December 22.
“The band started in 2005,” says Mike. “It was a slightly smaller ensemble. It was about six people and it just grew and grew a little bit each year, and in 2019 for the first time we added strings to the line-up. That was our first concert as the orchestra and we did one concert before Covid. We also did a recording session in late January 2020 just before everything started to happen. But we persevered and we did one or two shows towards the end of that year, and really it has just been about trying to build it up each year. We're now 32 for most of the shows. The optimum as far as I am concerned is 40 for a special show where we try to expand the ranks for the larger halls but for Worthing we will be 32 which is a nice number.
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Hide Ad“We describe the music as swing and big band and what is unusual about us is that we are an orchestra playing that music. At this time of the year there are lots of orchestras and each city has its own orchestra and they will do a lot of the traditional stuff. But we are slightly different. We are doing jazz and swing music which is our speciality and that makes it a little bit unlike what other people are doing around the country at the moment.
“It is a really authentic Christmas experience that we offer. The programme changes a little bit each night but you can expect to hear Judy Garland’s version of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and Frank Sinatra's Let It Snow and Andy Williams’ The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. We also like to try to include some unusual Christmas songs. One of them is called The Christmas Waltz which was written for Frank Sinatra. It is quite rarely performed. I have never seen it performed live by anyone. It gets covered by people sometimes but I like it because not many people do it. It is also a beautiful tune. It features one of our female vocalists which is just wonderful to hear. It has also got a little bit of nostalgia about Christmas being about family and being together. It is just an unusual song which makes it really good fun to do. And there's another Christmas song that we like to do, It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas which is less of a rarity apart from the way that we do it. We do it in an unusual time signature. We do it in a way that you certainly won't have heard before.
“But we also put lots of people's favourites in there as well. It's not just about reinventing the wheel. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways, and we make sure that the programme properly reflects the era which is the 1950s in general.”
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