Afternoon Tea, Part Two

HISTORY INSISTS that the Duchess of Bedford, on a visit to the Duke of Rutland in 1840, grew uncomfortable peckish as she awaited supper. It wouldn’t be served until at least 8 PM. She asked for a snack. It consisted of tea and some feathery sandwiches. Friends joined her, both for the refreshment and a chance to catch up on the news.

Thus was born afternoon tea, or “low tea,” as it’s sometimes termed, owing to the low tables (now, inappropriately, called “coffee tables”) on which it was served. Which also distinguishes it from “high tea,” which is a meal unto itself, a tradition born during the Industrial Revolution, when workers returned home ravenous. High tea is dinner; low tea is scones and cucumber sandwiches.

The latter is the ritual practiced each afternoon at 3:30 on board the Queen Mary when the ship isn’t easing in or out of port. A large ballroom, the Queen’s Room, is the main service area, but such can be the overflow that the Britannia Restaurant may be pressed into service.

Afternoon Tea, Part One

From the Vault Dept.: Inspired by my voluble chronicle of my recent travels, here’s a throwback piece. It’s chronicles a delightful stop on a trip to London my wife and I took 36 years ago. The prices mentioned below are, of course, now only a nostalgic dream.

                                                                                                

THAT ELUSIVE FOURTH MEAL OF THE DAY, afternoon tea! What is its appeal and how should it be practiced? For an answer, my wife and I traveled to London with a vision of all traffic stopping and all shops closing down at 4 PM to enable visitors and residents to indulge in this custom.

It's not that dramatic. In fact, we came upon our high tea quite by accident, while visiting the place that's as much of a tourist attraction as it is a department store: Harrods, in the wealthy suburb of Knightsbridge.

A Rolls-Royce was parked outside. Behind it sat a Mercedes-Benz 560SL. Several other no doubt pedigreed, hyphenated cars followed. The doorman sported more buttons than an elevator in a high-rise.

Inside was a mixture of British restraint and American let's-sell-'em fervor (the sale was to begin in a week: “There's only one Harrods. There's only one sale”' is the tagline).

This is the Crossgates Mall of central London, assuming you stripped Crossgates of its more useless stores and jacked the prices at the rest. Admittedly, that eliminates over half the mall, but you get the idea. Lots of stuff, full retail price.

Next Stop: The Cotswolds

THIS IS WHERE I GOT stuck in the bathtub. My wife and I share plenty of wonderful memories of our three days in England’s Cotswolds region, but there was something almost surreal about the bathtub incident that causes it to hijack at least my own memory.

We took the three-and-a-half hour drive from Seaford to Moreton-in-Marsh in an extremely comfortable Peugeot SUV, chatting with Haroon, our driver, all along the way. That may seem like too much, but it was a fascinating conversation as we learned about his years in his native Pakistan – which at one point involved a shootout where he got in the way and lingered near death for a while – and his now-happier life living in Birmingham with a wife and kids. You can understand that the ride never grew boring.

The uniformity of appearance from building to antique-looking building in the town is due to Cotswold stone, a type of Midlands-mined limestone that dates from the Jurassic Period. It’s prized for its oolite appearance, taken from the Proto-Hellenic word for egg, “ōyyón,” referring to the egglike bumps on the stone’s surface. And if the stone looks familiar, it’s because it also gives its distinctive appearance to Blenheim Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Our immediate destination, the Manor House Hotel, on M-i-M’s High Street, showed the charming combination of Cotswold stone on the outside and imaginative design within. The airy ground floor offered areas in which to relax, to work, to quaff; our third-floor (or, in England, second-floor) room waited at the end of a slanted-ceiling corridor along which I carefully ducked. And it couldn’t have been more charming and nicely appointed. And just look at that capacious bathtub!

First Stop: By the Sea

Travel Diary Dept.: My wife and I uprooted ourselves to travel for a month this summer. I’ve given a couple of accounts of our version of ocean travel, and I’ll get back to that shortly, but here’s a break from chronology and the water to explore the first dry-land stop on our itinerary: Seaford, a coastal town in southern England. All of the photos are my doing.

                                                                                 

AS A TOURIST, it seems hypocritical to seek “non-touristy” places to visit: after all, aren’t I traveling in order to see and otherwise experience that which has proven its appeal to others? Yes, but too often too many of those others are clogging the place I want to see. In planning a trip to the UK, my travel agent suggested a first stop on the south coast of England. Brighton was mentioned. So was Seaford, both of which lie east of Southampton, where our ship would dock, and south of London, which we would save until last.

Google Maps provided insight I could have gained nowhere else. I used the Street View function to walk along Brighton’s waterfront street, and I saw a row of ocean-facing buildings built to accommodate the tourists who’d be occupying the nearby beach. Seaford, on the other hand, not only had residences facing the ocean but also an esplanade facing a waterfront of large pebbles. Accommodations were fewer, but we found a place to stay in The Wellington Pub and Hotel, one block up from the esplanade, with its rooms atop what promised to be an old-fashioned pub.

Kiddie-Kar Travel

Guest Blogger Dept.: Speaking of travel, here’s Robert Benchley on the subject. Drawings, as usual, are by Gluyas Williams.

                                                                                            

IN AMERICA there are two classes of travel—first class, and with children. Traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third-class in Bulgaria. They tell me there is nothing lower in the world than third-class Bulgarian travel.

The actual physical discomfort of traveling with the Kiddies is not so great, although you do emerge from it looking as if you had just moved the piano upstairs single-handed. It is the mental wear-and-tear that tells and for a sensitive man there is only one thing worse, and that is a church wedding in which he is playing the leading comedy role.

There are several branches of the ordeal of Going on Choo-Choo, and it is difficult to tell which is the roughest. Those who have taken a very small baby on a train maintain that this ranks as pleasure along with having a nerve killed. On the other hand, those whose wee companions are in the romping stage, simply laugh at the claims of the first group. Sometimes you will find a man who has both an infant and a romper with him. Such a citizen should receive a salute of twenty-one guns every time he enters the city and should be allowed to wear the insignia of the Pater Dolorosa, giving him the right to solicit alms on the cathedral steps.

The Ocean Beneath Our Feet

WE HAVE NEVER crossed an ocean before. We have never even taken a shore-hugging cruise. With airplane travel growing ever more hellish, our recent vacation destinations have been places reachable by car. This year, we decided to go for broke. And I do mean broke, as we’ve never spent anything approaching this amount of money on fun before. We have conflicting stories of motivation. Susan insists it was to celebrate our 40th anniversary. I say it’s because we’re at an age at which coevals are dropping dead. I suppose both are true.

Let’s back up a bit to see how we got ourselves on board the Queen Mary 2. The home stretch, so to speak, occurred as we wheeled off the elevator and turned the corner. We faced a long, a very long hallway, although it seemed too small for a hallway, yet too large for an aisle. It was flanked with doors, as you’d expect in a hotel. But this was no ordinary corridor. My wife and I were proceeding to our stateroom on the Queen Mary 2, beginning what would be a month-long getaway. I sat in a transport chair. Susan pushed. We anticipated, correctly, that my weakening legs would be daunted by aspects of this trip. Besides: A chair gets you places denied to those attempting ordinary ambulation.

A Life on the Ocean Wave, Part 1

ONE OF THE ANNOYING FEATURES of the 1976 Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor movie “Silver Streak” was the amount of time the various characters spent explaining why they were taking a train, as if making apologies for this time-honored means of travel. Airplane travel could be luxurious through the 1950s, but fares fell and the carriers figured out how to fit more and more people into those airborne shells. At one point in the 1960s, my father, a frequent air-traveler for his business, realized that a newly hatched cabin-seating plan was little different from slave-transport ships, a comparison that has picked up some internet life.

The 1965 Broadway musical “Do I Hear a Waltz?” has a Stephen Sondheim lyric that finishes “Your chance of survival is so remote,/You're far better off to cut your throat – /But who has the time to take a boat?/What do we do? We fly!” So it was bad even then and, as you undoubtedly know, it has become far, far worse.

Especially for me, as I am large both in vertical and horizontal directions. I’m the fellow that late-arriving passengers hope like hell not to be seated beside. I’m the one getting yelled at by flight attendants because my foot has intruded into the aisle. So when the subject arose of taking a post (such as it is)-pandemic vacation, I insisted on a domestic, driveable itinerary. Until a friend decried my short-sightedness and reminded me that there’s a ship that crosses the Atlantic.

Major Impact

AMY ENGELHARDT IS A VERY FUNNY PERSON. I hesitate to label her a comedian, although comedy seems to bubble from the soul of her being. But she’s also an excellent singer, as deft at ensemble singing as she is putting across a solo song. And that song may well be one of her own, because she’s an extremely skilled songwriter as well, whose solo recording “Not Gonna Be Pretty” is an amazing distillation of her talents. She also writes prose with the deft hand of one who lives comfortably among words.

Amy Engelhardt

So I should call her a comedian, because it’s the funny people who are most adept at being serious. They understand how irony works; they play with sounds and language to underscore serious points. And Engelhardt brings this all together in “Impact,” which I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s an intense hour of songs and words with Amy front and center telling a story she needed to tell. That it celebrates – in only most moderately joyful sense of the term – the tragedy of the airplane disaster in Lockerbie, Scotland, in a labyrinthine journey of heartbreak and grief, without lapsing into the maudlin or making a cheap sale of the heart-warming finish, is a testament to Engelhardt’s many skills, all brought together in a piece speaks to all of us who have been anywhere near a tragedy. In other words, all of us.

She establishes three things at the outset of her show: First, that’s she’s a Syracuse University grad; second, that she grew up in New Jersey; and third, that the story to follow will celebrate “thin moments.” Let’s take the last one first. Thin moments, she explained, are those moments in which you feel an uncanny resonance between whatever it is you’re up to and something related, portentous, and less-defined. It’s not déjà vu, although there’s some overlap, and it’s not the phenomenon of “thin places,” another Celtic term, but this one describing a resonant location.

I Put a Spell on You

THE WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE’S “Midsummer Night’s Dream” begins and ends in a nobleman’s home, taking us into the woods only after the plot has leapt into complications. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears fashioned an opera libretto that invites us into a fairy-kingdom right away, keeping us there until the final scene forces us back into a fancy drawing room. The emphasis thus shifts from quarreling nobles to the magic of this Athenian wonderland, even as the music that Britten wrote suggests uneasiness. “Take nothing for granted while you’re here,” it says. “However well you think you know the play, your expectations are about to be confounded.”

Puck (Oliver Barlow) and fairies.
Photo by Tristram Kenton.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is one of the more popular of Britten’s many operas, and this revival of Peter Hall’s 1981 production, playing through the end of August at the Glyndebourne Festival, is more spirited and charming than any other version I’ve seen. Why this opera is part of this season is examined below; why you should see it now follows immediately.

I like an old-fashioned curtain-up, and this one is thrilling. As conductor Dalia Stasevska leads the London Philharmonic through the unsettling glissandi that open the piece, we see sparkles, a forest, an aggregation of sprites. The glade of glistening trees ease back their branches and leaves to allow the spritely chorus to advance to the proscenium. The singing begins – and it’s an augmented Trinity Boys Choir, so the difficult music is effortlessly sung – and what seemed at first to be merely a moon-drenched sylvan woodland reveals itself as anthropomorphic, each black-clad tree wearing foot-baskets of shrubbery with leaves-laden branches for arms. John Bury’s designs were inspired by the art of Arthur Rackham, but if they’re of an era, it’s a timeless one.

The Money of Power

WHENEVER I LAMENT the lack of cultural awareness across the U.S., I point to the support given to the arts in Europe, where it’s generally understood that opera and dance, theater and classical music will never draw enough paying customers to provide a livelihood to anyone who professionally sings or dances or otherwise writes or performs. Every nation needs its cultural identity to be buttressed by the fine arts, as they’re (unfortunately) snootily known, and smart government entities come up with money in support.

Sir Simon Rattle

If, in the U.S., it splits across party lines, that’s no surprise. Cultural literacy goes hand-in-hand with education, and education encourages liberal thinking. That’s why so many conservatives weaponize their lack of smarts and attack the institutions and traditions of education. Thus the book-bannings, the arts-money cuts, the general hostility toward universities. When Republicans seize enough power in Washington, DC, these days, one of their first targets is the National Endowment for the Arts, whose already minuscule budget is dwarfed by such precious commodities as defense spending. But Republicans are fighting for their own survival. The smarter you are, they understand on some smart-ass level, the more likely it is you’ll vote for someone else.

You Don’t Say!

I DISLIKE speaking with strangers. In fact, I resist speaking with almost anyone, but circumstances rarely allow such silence. Pandemic isolation was glorious, as most of my conversations were conducted through electronic means and allowed time to reflect and time to answer or ignore. Two problems typically arise: I have no wish to engage in a conversation about trivialities – weather conditions, sports scores, Presidential indictments – and, when you get right down to it, I usually have nothing worthwhile to say.

I recently wrote and performed a one-man show as Sydney Greenstreet, the brilliant stage actor who made his movie debut in 1941 in “The Maltese Falcon” and had eight more years of film stardom. Many of the lines I put into his mouth resonate deeply with me. For example: “At heart, I am a bashful man. I approach social gatherings with trepidation. My thoughts, my emotions, are wont to gallop into untoward areas. To speak without forethought brings the risk of betraying myself.”

In the company of my wife, with whom I’ve lived for forty years, I have a chatty buffer. She loves to talk. She offers herself, fully and honestly, to friend and stranger alike. Where some are tongue-loosened only after a couple of potent cocktails, she’ll be the life of the party after only a single cup of tea. This gives me the chance to fade into the background, to hide in an armchair and silently study the fireplace.

Star-Crossed

THE WORLD OF OPERA taught us that when a couple falls into a duet, they are in some way bonding. Usually it’s love. Sometimes it’s hate. It’s a powerful device that now informs all manner of musical theater. But when you’re looking for powerful examples of the power of duet, go to Charles Gounod. He packed four of them in his “Roméo et Juliette.”

Duke Kim and Magdalena Kuźma
Photo: Evan Zimmerman/
The Glimmerglass Festival

He was driven by desperation. Gounod’s “Faust” was a huge success, but he followed it with three flops. “Roméo et Juliette,” which premiered in 1867, turned it all around for him, and when you hear these duets in the current Glimmerglass Festival production, you’ll be just as enthusiastic as those Théâtre Lyrique audiences were in Paris way back then.

You need authoritative voices that convey this sudden, time-stopping passion, and that first duet, which begins with Romeo sighing about his “adorable angel,” is something of a warm-up piece. The couple is just getting to know one another, as yet unaware that their families are caught in that wearisome feud. Duke Kim and Magdalena Kuźma engage in a childlike back-and-forth. We’ve already heard each of their voices in solo spots, but it’s here, as their voices twine and meld, that we are treated to the richness of a pair of voices – their voices – in harmony. A different approach is required of the singers, each of whom must tune in to the other to make the blend become something approaching a single voice without losing individual identity.

The Beasts of All Possible Worlds

THE EXPERIENCE OF SEEING Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” has changed in recent years. I’ve seen a variety of productions – that variety aided by the fact that this opera, or show, or whatever category-defying label you wish to give it has gone through a dizzying variety of iterations during its 67 years of existence. (It’s got to be the only piece that lists both Dorothy Parker and Stephen Sondheim as lyricists.)

Brian Vu and Katrina Galka
Photo courtesy the Glimmerglass Festival

At its heart, of course, is Voltaire’s timeless, digressive tale of a good-natured naïf whose pursuit of love and a promised happiness takes him across a couple of continents and through a succession of violent conflicts, laced with improbabilities and coincidences that would make Baron Munchausen blush.

What’s happened recently, however, is that world events have caught up with the piece. What may have seemed like overblown satire in Voltaire’s time (indeed, he got himself kicked out of both France and Germany at various times) doesn’t seem so incredible any more.

So here’s Candide, gormless but game, a-burst with the optimism he’s learned from his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, and conceiving a passion for the lovely Cunegonde. All that stands in the way of this romance is the matter of birth. She’s an aristocrat; he’s a bastard. Ejected from the castle Schloss Thunder-ten-Tronck in Westphalia, he wanders through a succession of horrors while clinging to an eroding optimism. Tenor Brian Vu informs this role with a wide-eyed, gung-ho spirit.

Soft Be Her Tears

EVERYTHING THAT MAKES Puccini’s 1896 La bohème one of the opera-loving world’s all-time favorites is on display in the current Glimmerglass Festival production. Killer arias sung by incredibly skilled artists; ensemble pieces so stirring that your body will spontaneously increase its white-blood-cell count; stage movement and choreography that spurs the pacing when needed and enhances the poignancy when that’s needed, too. 

Joshua Blue and Teresa Perrotta
Photo courtesy The Glimmerglass Festival

It goes without saying that the music has its most fervent champion in the Glimmerglass orchestra, but I’m saying it anyway because it bears repeating for the sheer fun of repeating it. Puccini’s score sweeps with romantic gestures galore, of course, but there’s also much within it that begs for nuance and shading, and conductor Nader Abbassi not only showed a thorough understanding of the score’s demands but also the deft ability to support both the singer and the song.

But what’s happening, as you sit in the darkened theater and let the experience draw you in, is a confluence of these elements that uses your eyes and ears as entryways to your tear ducts. Or, to put it less cutely, as a direct avenue to your emotions. Puccini masterfully wields the tools that result in expert manipulation. Prepare to be manipulated.

Party at the Schumanns’ House

MUSIC GIVES A SOUL TO A PARTY. Not recorded music; that’s a cop-out which has become all too normalized because we’ve gotten so far away from making our own. I’m talking about putting that piano to use, or hauling out that guitar. Playing chamber music is a rich form of conversation, richer than party chatter. You listen to your fellow musicians in a manner that invites each instrumental voice to inhabit yourself even as you subsume yourself to the music you’re making.

The Schumanns – Clara and Robert – knew this. True, they were in the business of writing music, but when their musical friends stopped by, pleasant sounds were heard. This is the premise of “An Invitation at the Schumanns,’” a recording by the Paris-based Trio Dichter, an ensemble made up of pianist Fiona Mato, violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, and cellist Hanna Salzenstein.

As we expiate our sins of a patriarchy that demanded we celebrate Robert Schumann’s works and ignore those of Clara, his wife, we are discovering that she was a dab hand at composition herself, even as she was tasked with raising the children. Two of her works grace the program: the first of her Three Romances, Op 22, for violin and piano, and a Notturno for solo piano drawn from her Soirées musicales, Op. 6. These are beautiful performances – but they also convey the sense of intimacy you’d enjoy in the music salon of an accommodating home.

Taking Opera Seriously

From the Vault of the High Cs Dept.: Thirty years ago I reviewed a pair of NYC Opera performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and correctly predicted that the opera company’s residency soon would end. What didn’t end was the horrible amplification inflicted on mainstage events – although I should note that I haven’t been to that venue in many years, discouraged by the number of drunks who began showing up at Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. I assume the management was papering the house, but why pass out tickets at the city’s gin joints?

                                                                                          

THE TRUTH ABOUT the New York City Opera's short, pre-summer visits to SPAC is that they’re a satire. A spoof. When a production is done reasonably poorly, as was the case with “Carmen,” it’s a poor joke. When it’s a reasonably good production, like “The Mikado,” the joke gets merely depressing.

Richard McKee

You could say that the joke is also a riddle: how many people will pay for amphitheater and lawn tickets to see what we call opera until they realize it’s actually not even as good as television? And can we fool them next year, too?

Unlike music and dance, which are appreciated viscerally, opera is a theatrical experience that engages a complicated combination of the senses. It requires an immediate involvement from the audience. But New York City Opera, like many another pretentious company, shuns the use of the English translations. And they’ve suckered the audience into accepting distracting supertitles as a compromise.

Opera is also a celebration of the human voice, a celebration entirely negated by the fact that even the amphitheater audience hears the singers amplified through a hardly-adequate speaker system (the SPAC techies boast that it’s the same thing they use for rock concerts, man, and management turns an obviously deaf ear to the problem).

At the Table

THERE’S A RECEIVED NOTION that American food is exemplified by the blandest of processed inventions, those rubbery slabs of “American” cheese being the epitome. By altering the standards by which the cuisine is judged – keeping the geography, but extending the history and re-coloring the inhabitants – we discover an impressive variety of foodstuffs and recipes.

Falafel from Michigan? Turns out that there’s an Arab population near Dearborn that started to boom in the early 1900s when Henry Ford told a Yemeni sailor about job opportunities. How about Marionberry Pie from Oregon? That celebrates a berry created at Oregon State University in 1948, a berry that grows in Marion County during the month of July and is too soft to export but snapped up by locals. A recipe from Montana for Bison Meatballs with Huckleberry Sauce celebrates the animal that was slaughtered to near extinction for racist reasons, now enjoying a more boutique presence as the meat is recognized as a healthy beef alternative.

Smithsonian American Table travels through time and geography to present a historical narrative that goes way beyond the standard bounds of imperialist tradition. It’s part social narrative, part recipes, interspersed with fascinating illustrations and sidebars. The dividing line for this country’s history is, of course, European colonization, but the book suggests another, later dividing line, noting, “a movement – that of food sovereignty – seeks to reclaim and return to those holistic and culturally significant foodways.” Meaning a return to the cultivation of local produce and well-raised meatstuffs.

In the Family

From the Food Vault Dept.: Here’s the restaurant review I wrote 30 years ago, offered now just to make me feel all the older. I had moved to NY’s Montgomery County in 1990, and was still getting to know the area when I discovered Pepe’s Restaurant in nearby Amsterdam. It seemed like one of those places that would live on forever, and indeed was run by family members for 77 years until it closed in April, 2000. Nothing has taken its place. (Nothing could take its place.)

                                                                                            

THE NEIGHBORHOOD ON WEST MAIN STREET has changed considerably since Pepe’s opened in 1923. The ethnic character, certainly, is different – what was once a stronghold of Italian newcomers has melting-potted into something more homogeneous by becoming more diverse. The look of the area, too, has changed, simply by staying the same, aging and decaying, accepting only a few later buildings.

There’s still a little enclave of Italian restaurants there, with a newcomer Polish eatery down the street, but Pepe’s has long and quietly dominated the scene.

It’s a friendly place with a warm, simple look. Chances are that you’re going to be greeted by one member of the Pepe family and served by another. In the kitchen, Sam Pepe holds forth as he has done for the past half-century, following in a family tradition. In fact, there’s another branch of the family running a bakery in Amsterdam, which is where the cognoscenti go for the best loaves and rolls in town ... but Sam bakes his own bread for the restaurant.

Glenn Miller and Me

MY MOTHER WANTED ME to move back in with the family. It was 1974. I was eighteen and already had been living on my own for two years as I finished high school and sought work. I was in Connecticut. The family lived near Chicago, a relocation brought on by my father’s change of employer. During a visit I made that year, Mom played a clever trump card. She knew that what I sought most was a girlfriend, and reasoned that if she could provide one, I’d stay.

Knowing also that I planned to see a concert at Ravinia, the Chicago Symphony’s longtime summer home, she proposed that I escort a young woman I’d never met, one who worked as a nurse alongside my mother at an area hospital. “But I’m not going to see the Chicago Symphony,” I confessed. “I’m going to a Glenn Miller concert.” “I’m sure she’ll like that,” my mother assured me. How I wish that had been true.

To be a Glenn Miller fan as a teen in the 1970s was difficult. You were aligning yourself with a generation that came of age during World War II – my parents’ generation, in other words, and the teen-aged me didn’t suffer those fogies very generously. One persistent piece of high-school-aged bitterness sees me hurrying, one Saturday morning, to the home of a classmate who could not have been bettered in beauty, and who suddenly noticed me in school one day. (I remember no names attached to this story, which is a kindness.) Because of my oddball taste in music and other realms of the arts, I was accustomed to being shunned. But she invited me to her house. “I know you’ll have a good time,” she declared.

Cooking with Cool

From the Jazz Vault Dept.: As noted elsewhere in these pages, I’ve been a Scott Hamilton fan since I discovered him at Eddie Condon’s on West 54th Street back in the mid-1970s. So it was a treat to catch up with the group when they performed at the State University at Albany in 1988, and here’s the review I wrote.

                                                                                                   

REPLACING A SAXOPHONE REED takes a few moments; you moisten the new one in your mouth,   unscrew the ligature on the mouthpiece, line up the reed, replace the ligature...

Scott Hamilton

Tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton had occasion to replace his reed during a concert Sunday evening, and he did it in no hurry, laconically performing the necessary action while pianist Mike Ledonne soloed. He’s that cool about it. In fact, all five of the players have such a laid-back aspect that you might worry whether they can cook at all.

They can cook.

This is a group that, with one pianist or another, has been working together for more than 15 years. John Bunch has been at the keyboard for many of the last few years, but Ledonne was an able and inspiring replacement.

Guitarist Chris Flory, drummer Chuck Riggs and bass player Phil Flanigan are, like Hamilton, in their mid-30s. While it’s easy to see them as mainstream, swing-oriented jazzers, they actually assimilate a little bit of everything that has informed acoustic playing since the ‘30s. Hamilton, in whose voice are the accents of Ben Webster and Flip Phillips, is a player with a unique sound who revels in the standards and counts Sinatra as another major influence.