In 1979, Stephen Sondheim’s epic musical thriller Sweeney Todd (The Demon Barber of Fleet Street) premiered on Broadway and quickly scooped up eight Tony Awards including Best Musical. About six months after the production’s opening, legendary bandleader Stan Kenton passed away in Los Angeles. Among the audiences during Sweeney’s initial Broadway run was an aspiring 25-year-old composer (and bassist with the Glenn Miller Orchestra) named Terry Vosbein, who was also a veteran of numerous Kenton clinics and summer Jazz Orchestra In Residence programs.
Thirty-two years later, Vosbein, now a Professor of Music at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA, has injected his love for Sondheim’s monumental score into his lifelong admiration for Kenton, and the result is a near-perfect synthesis of two musical geniuses (Kenton’s only previous association with Sondheim, aside from the former’s Grammy-winning 1961 adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story for which the young Sondheim had provided the lyrics, was Dave Barduhn’s arrangement of “Send In the Clowns”, from A Little Night Music, on the Kenton ’76 album).
From the opening trombone choir on “The Barber and his Wife” to the final explosion of Keith Brown’s drums, the Kenton aura is steadfastly maintained, reflecting the influences of such iconoclastic Kenton-affiliated composer/arrangers as Pete Rugolo, Bill Russo, Bob Graettinger, Gene Roland, Johnny Richards, Bill Holman, Dee Barton, and Willie Maiden.
Foremost among the band’s soloists is trombonist Tom Lundberg, who represents a continuation of Kenton’s lead/solo trombone legacy epitomized by Kai Winding, Milt Bernhart, Bob “Fitz” Fitzpatrick, and Dick Shearer, and whether quoting Sondheim’s “archrival” Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber (“King Herod’s Song” from Jesus Christ Superstar) in “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir” or joining section mate Don Hough in a duet on “My Friends” (a paean originally sung by Todd to his long-lost razors in the production!), Lundberg is consistently outstanding.
Vosbein’s arrangements of “Johanna” and “Not While I’m Around” faithfully echo the Kenton ballad tradition, with solos from Lundberg, Hough, and lead trumpeter Stewart Cox on the former, and pianist Ben Dockery, lead altoist Doug Rinaldo, trumpeter Mike Wyatt, and (of course) Lundberg on the latter. Other soloists include tenor saxists Alan Wyatt (“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”, “Pretty Women”), altoist Dave King, trumpeter Rich Willey (“Green Finch and Linnet Bird”), and Latin percussionist David Knight.
In my book, Fleet Street easily merits a place alongside Kenton’s West Side Story, which was recorded a half-century earlier, and is most certainly worthy of Grammy consideration.
- Robert J. Robbins
Big Band International Magazine, August 2011 edition