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Cheltenham Town Hall
The 2011 Cheltenham Jazz festival, curated by the springheeled Jamie Cullum and packed with young stars, opened with one of the oldest still working. But, since you could close your eyes while the octogenarian Dame Cleo Laine was ushering in Creole Love Call and hear a voice almost as fresh as the 26-year-old Adelaide Hall's on the original Duke Ellington recording, she was the perfect festival opener.
The first half was a businesslike set of pieces by Ellington and the late Sir John Dankworth from Laine's backing band, led by her bassist son Alec Dankworth. It was inevitably eclipsed by anticipation of the star in the wings, but saxophonist Andy Panayi's soliloquy on Ellington's Tonight I Shall Sleep was both a subtle caressing of a delicate melody, and a reminder of an ailing John Dankworth's fragile 2009 rendition, in one of his last major performances. Cleo Laine stirred similar emotions with He Was Beautiful, carefully touching its new meanings for her as a solo artist and life-traveller in the wake of Dankworth's death, but in a way that was tender and unsentimental.
A fast-moving show punctuated only by the singer's occasional anecdotal breathers opened with a speedy I Thought About You. She shrewdly shifted It Amazes Me from self-mockery to wonderment, ran through old and new versions of John Dankworth's settings of Shakespeare verses (reaching a soulful roar on Dunsinane Blues) and rattled exuberantly through It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing as a prelude to the poignant He Was Beautiful. A few Kleenexes appeared then, but it was hard to see whether the standing audience or Dame Cleo herself was more moved.
