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Guest artist Fred Astaire makes fall concert sing

The November Fall Concert featured a special “surprise” guest artist. The Cool Nights Jazz band performed “Puttin’ on the Ritz” by Irving Berlin while Fred Astaire tapped and sang on a screen behind the orchestra. 

“The difficulty in performing such a work as this is that the recording will not ‘flex’ as does the jazz band in a live performance. The tempi are strict and we must stay right to Astaire’s moves or we won’t end together,” said George Scharr, director of the Cool Nights Jazz band.

Scharr credits Jung-Ho Pak and the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra for the idea; the CCSO did a similar synchronization with George Gershwin and his “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The film clip, taken from the 1946 movie Blue Skies, placed “Puttin’ on the Ritz” squarely on the charts and in all the households of 1946 post-war America. Although the song was written in 1929 by Berlin, it was this Astaire sequence that made it so popular.

The FA music ensembles, which played to a packed audience in November, include two jazz bands, the orchestra and the brass emsemble. The chorus will perform at a later date.