Thu, February 19, 2004

Jazz in his blood

Michael Danso brings his From Harlem To Hollywood to Toronto

It made sense that veteran jazz-vocalist Michael Danso would be watching Ken Burns' acclaimed docu series Jazz when it debuted. But what he saw came completely from left field. "The Louis Jordan segment is on, and it's set in an apartment with all these beautiful girls surrounding Louis -- I think the song was Everybody Eats At My House," Danso says in his lilting Scots burr. "And sitting on the piano is my mother.

"She was always saying, 'Oh, you guys think you're something with your (music) videos. Well, we used to make videos in my day in the '40s. I was in videos in Los Angeles when you were a gleam in your father's eye.' Frankly, we didn't believe her."

Danso's mother was Pinkie Mackenzie, a Scots big-band singer, and his stepfather was drummer Billy George, who broke the colour barrier in Glasgow nightclubs.

The discovery of his mother's Hollywood experience was a spiritual shot in the arm for From Harlem To Hollywood, the labour of love Danso wrote, produced and has performed through the '90s.

The orchestra-backed jazz show tells tales from the careers of Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen and Cole Porter, and the music which debuted at New York's Cotton Club and made its way to the movies in the '40s.

"I've been doing it since 1990, with just about every major orchestra across Canada. But I've never done it in Toronto." Until now. With conductor Charles T. Cozens, Danso brings From Harlem To Hollywood to the Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts Saturday for two shows as part of an all-Hollywood double bill with David Warrack's A Symphony Of The Silver Screen (Warrack conducts the Canada Pops Orchestra for his program of themes from Singin' In The Rain to Titanic).

Danso's career has taken him from the London cast of Hair to L.A. to Toronto (where he settled down and raised a family with wife Cyrel). His symphonic-jazz approach got a test run with his earlier Gershwin tribute White Tie And Tails. But the whole idea, he says, was inspired in the now-defunct George's Spaghetti House by a cigar.

"I was doing this repertoire for years at George's and places like that. And one night somebody came in and lit up a cigar, and the other patrons asked him to put it out and there was a great big kerfuffle. And I thought after 'Y'know, this music wasn't written for a place like this. It was written for film and the concert stage.' I looked at the careers of Lena Horne and Mel Torme and the Gershwins and, yes, they were all performed by trios, but they were augmented by strings of all kinds.

"So I wrote From Harlem To Hollywood putting that experience in a symphonic setting. I've got people like Charles Cozens and (composer) Victor Davies, who know how to write in notation classical players can swing to."

Next up: "I'm in the middle of writing a new thing, The Cotton Club Chronicles," Danso says. "It's a heck of a story, this tremendous club that was owned by the champion boxer Jack Johnson. When the Cotton Club started to broadcast on the radio, they started to film small vignettes for the movie theatre, with, say, Alice Faye and Betty Grable dancing in a harem scene and the Nicholas Brothers coming on and doing their wonderful act.

"When they ran down South, the Nicholas Brothers would be cut out. But a lot of coloured acts got to go to Hollywood and do their thing because of that place."