Thursday, February 5, 2009

In the Mood for bell music

Chicago Bronze is back in the swing of things! We completed another recording series for GIA, which will be included in the 2009 catalog. Now we've started on our Spring concert series. You can find one of our April concert near you on our web site.

One of the new pieces we'll be playing is "In the Mood," arranged by Herb Geisler.
In the Mood was originally called the "Tar Paper Stomp," written by Wingy Manone in 1929, but it's the 1939 recording by Glenn Miller Orchestra that made the song a famous anthem of the "big-band" era.
It has since become a jazz standard, and has been performed by a wide variety of artists. The strangest rendition is debatably the 1977 version by Ray Stevens, who performed the song entirely in chicken clucks, which beame a top-40 hit in both the United States and the United Kingdon.

While it might be fun for each of us to cluck our notes, we decided to stick with playing them on handbells.