Big Band Music

Bob Dylan as big-band music? You bet, says Nell Carter. "He's written some of the most beautiful music," says the singer-actress. "My arrangements of his ballads are big band." More conventional big-band fare will also be spotlighted when Carter takes the stage for a one-night, two-set appearance Tuesday at the Moonlight Tango Cafe in Sherman Oaks. She will be backed by Maiden Voyage, the 17-piece all-female big band headed by saxophonist Ann Patterson, which also performs its own numbers.

Music of the 1940s will be featured when the Society for Preservation of Big Bands performs Friday at the Garden Grove Community Center. The 16-piece band will play the big-band sounds of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Harry James at a dance party to relive the music of the past and to raise money for projects of the Garden Grove Rotary Club. "We want to keep alive the music of our younger days," said Bruce Rhinehart, 70, a retired optometrist who helped form the band in 1961.

Weird is relative. Take opalescent purple eye shadow and Tammy Faye eyelashes. In the mid-'80s, every "cool" girl at my high school glopped on the goo. I was strictly into black liquid eyeliner and bright red lips--the Audrey Hepburn look. The makeup matched my bouffant 'do and the layers of starched petticoats that I wore under my full skirts.

When Bob Florence takes the stage with his quartet at the Ascension Lutheran Church a week from Sunday, he'll be slightly out of context--in more than one way. This is the first time the classically oriented Sunday Afternoon Musicale series will lean in the direction of jazz. Florence's reputation on the West Coast jazz scene is almost reflexively associated with big band music.

Composer-arranger-saxophonist Tom Kubis credits his parents with developing his musical interest, including his special love for Dixieland and pop music of the 1930s and '40s. "I was blessed with parents who loved that kind of music and played it all the time. My dad was a huge fan of the big bands of the '40s. He had a collection of 78s that was huge, and we'd go through it looking for great trumpet and clarinet solos.

The 16-piece Society for Preservation of Big Bands, formed more than 30 years ago by part-time musicians, will perform Friday night for local charities. The Garden Grove Rotary Club is sponsoring the dance party featuring the music of the 1940s at the Garden Grove Community Center, beginning at 7:30 p.m.

In these recessionary times, the launching of a new orchestra seems like a hazardous venture. Nevertheless, Tuesday will mark the debut, at the Moonlight Tango in Sherman Oaks, of a triple-threat ensemble that prom ises to sound a fresh and exciting note in the uneven playing field of big-band music. It will consist of Super Sax, the team that brings old Charlie Parker solos to life by harmonizing them for five saxophones; a 15-piece orchestra that will incorporate Super Sax; and L. A.

If you want quaint, Ojai's got it. On Wednesday evening, under the spreading oaks in downtown Libbey Park, a time warp clicks in. An Art Deco fountain bubbles softly and the smell of hot popcorn fills the air as a crowd settles around a lighted bandstand. Nearby, a balloon man hands out bright orbs to children who run with them through the shadows.

For polished ballroom dancers such as Jack and Charlene Mitchell, the Hotel del Coronado is the only place to be Sunday nights. By 7:30, the veteran big band Bill Green and his Orchestra is in full swing, and a mesmerizing cloud of sound floats over the dance floor as if wafting from an old Philco radio. Jack Mitchell, shoes polished, hair glistening neatly in place, steers his wife around the hardwood floor.