Our second concert for the 2005–2006 season is not your usual Cantata Singers of Ottawa fare:

Cantata Singers of Ottawa goes Jazz!

The voice is a substantial part of Jazz music. Some of the most prolific figures of the genre are singers: Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington, Tony Bennett and Al Jarreau. Over the course of Jazz history, the use of the choir has evolved but never really found its raison d'être. The chamber choir is seldom featured as an independent jazz instrument; maybe Duke Ellington gave one of the more sincere efforts in his Sacred Concertos. The vocal exponents in today's jazz music scene are small vocal groups like The Manhattan Transfer, The Real Group, Take 6, and Ottawa's own Quintessence.

Nils Lindberg is a musician with many faces, performing as a jazz pianist (i.e., with Duke Ellington on his Scandinavian tour), writing folk music or composing a Requiem in the classical tradition. As with all Swedish Jazz compositions, Lindberg's music has a folkloric undertone, and one can even find some national, romantic influences. The suite O Mistress mine, based on texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, is a set of a dozen short songs for instruments, soloist and choir.

The second main œuvre in the program is by George Shearing, a blind jazz pianist from England now living in the USA. Like Lindberg, Shearing also draws his inspiration from the classics; Shakespeare is the author of Shearing's entire suite Music to Hear. But, unlike Lindberg, Shearing uses the choir as a vocal Big Band, creating a broad sound picture, which is accompanied by piano and double bass. Even though some parts remind us of music of Shakespeare's own time, Shearing's ease with melodies and rhythmic undertone always gives a modern lilt to the work.

Then there is, of course, Shearing's classic Lullaby of Birdland from 1952. This song, like many others in this concert—Sukiyaki, A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square, and Walk between the raindrops—is first and foremost a love song.

On a lighter note, we present Tuxedo Junction and On the sunny side of the street. Smile, with words and music by Charlie Chaplin, reminds us immediately of the movies of this great actor, where laughter, or even just a smile, offers the best medicine for aching and sorrowful hearts.

The musical introduction to this swinging evening with the Cantata Singers of Ottawa comes through Jean Belmont's setting of If music be the food of love. Poet Colonel Henry Heveningham takes the first seven words from Shakespeare's (his contemporary) Twelfth Night and creates a most beautiful choral statement, "Sing on!" With the stage set, we need only Belmont's beautiful music to prepare our ears and hearts for the following two hours of close harmonies and light-hearted swing.