Debbie Harry and The Jazz Passengers
Debbie Harry and The Jazz Passengers
Posted: 26 Mar 2011
Debbie Harry, The Jazz Passengers and Northern Sinfonia
The Sage Gateshead
25 March 2011
Picture by Mike Ruiz
Imagine you’re watching ‘Later’ when Jools Holland has assembled a range of diverse musicians and put them together to see what happens. I kept expecting Jools to appear and shout a belated ‘Hootenanay’ and while that didn’t happen, 65 (and not looking a day over 45) year old Debbie Harry did let on that she’d heard her first ‘Why-aye.’
Here we were then, a packed Hall One, eager to be part of the opening night of the seventh Gateshead International Jazz Festival and once again The Sage is to be congratulated on assembling a diverse range of events, this year with a distinctly American feel.
A day after launching Blondie’s new album ‘Panic of Girls’ with a swipe at X-Factor artists who get their breaks at the cost of artistic control, the New Yorker dubbed ‘Punk’s answer to Maryiln Monroe’ left ‘Heart of Glass’, ‘Maria, ‘Denis, Denis’, ‘Hanging on the Telephone’ and the rest in the dressing room as she practised what she preached by coming out of her comfort zone and teaming up with New York alt-jazz devotees ‘The Jazz Passengers’ and – just for good measure – The Northern Sinfonia Orchestra conducted by Robert Ziegler.
While Harry has worked with The Jazz Passengers on numerous occasions over the years, this was only the third time the collaboration has extended to working with an orchestra, the last time a decade ago at The Barbican.
With songs dealing with the world economic malaise and Alzheimer’s disease this was definitely not what you might find on X-Factor, but an evening arranged by Jazz Passenger Bill Ware came together with the artistes of all genres finding enough parallel lines to get the festival off to a sparkling start.
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