An angled elbow, a raised baton, and the 44-piece EFG London Jazz Festival Orchestra was off, gliding into Open Up Your Senses, a dreamy tune written and sung by rising US star Tyreek McDole. “Won't you open up your senses, eliminate pretenses,” crooned the Haitian American, 25, in a baritone so warm it seemed to ruffle your hair. It was a fittingly sumptuous start to the EFG London Jazz Festival's long established opening gala, in which a dazzling roster of soloists, the famous and about-to-be, took turns to celebrate that most universal of instruments: the human voice.
London's soul queen Natalie Williams delivered a cover of Stevie Wonder's Dancing to the Rhythm, a tune whose original gigantic orchestral backing, all slaloming horns and vertiginous strings, was ably replicated here. From the off, the arrangements of conductor Guy Barker — a national institution, longhaired in a sharp blue suit — cast a sort of radiant jazz haze over the likes of Marvin Gaye's classic What's Going On, charismatically sung by UK-based vocalist Vula Malinga, and Till There Was You, the show tune covered by the Beatles and here by young New Yorker Stella Cole, a throwback singer whose sepia-tinted charm just needed a few floating hearts and fluttering love birds.
