Vol. 5, No. 6, June 2008
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Smooth Operators
Manhattan Transfer appears at Showboat’s House of Blues at 9 p.m. on Saturday, June 7. Tickets are $37 and $54.
If you love jazz standards and silken harmonies set to exquisite arrangements, don’t miss the vocal quartet Manhattan Transfer at Showboat’s House of Blues on Saturday, June 7.
The brilliant quartet has been making beautiful music since the early 1970s, when New York cabbie-cum-singer Tim Hauser picked up a fare, Laurel Masse, who would turn out to be the first member of his fledgling group.
Word of mouth was critical to the success of the Manhattan Transfer, which faithfully revived a genre neglected since the big band era. They developed a cult following at New York clubs like Trude Heller’s, Reno Sweeney, and Max’s Kansas City. Their 1975 debut album led to a CBS television show, and they were huge in Europe, where the albums Coming Out and Pastiche made it to the Top 10.
Masse was forced to leave after a serious auto accident. The final ensemble—Hauser, Janis Seigel, Alan Paul and Masse’s replacement, Cheryl Bentyne—still set the standard for other vocal groups (conspicuously the New York Voices), recreating the romance, soulfulness and jazz-inflected spunk of the 1940s and ’50s in classics like “Blue Champagne,” “Tuxedo Junction,” “Four Brothers,” “Candy” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”
Though Manhattan Transfer enjoyed just one mainstream hit, “Operator,” the group has earned ardent fans everywhere. Here’s your chance to hear some sweet, sophisticated jazz, the old-fashioned way.
