Search - Ritz :: Ritz

Manhattan Transfer - MOVE OVER!!!

Seeker | 10/30/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Vocal jazz fans, if you've never heard of The Ritz, quick, give Amazon your credit card number and get yourself a copy of this little gem (and its sibling, "Movin' Up") - how amazing to see this music available again!!



The Ritz was a cool little jazz combo centered in Boston back in the 80's, a smoothly rhythmic vocal quartet with a rhythm section to die for. As a local music student with a love of jazz, I caught them live in concert whenever I could and mourned when the group started breaking up in the very late 80's/early 90's.



To be blunt, this group was everything that I'd always felt Manhattan Transfer SHOULD have been - they're sharp, they're together, they're rhythmically clean, they have a close vocal blend (but without that irritating over-precision that goes too far in the other direction) - and best of all, when they swing, it sounds like jazz, not rock or pop. To steal a line from a vocalese on this album, they've got "just that certain combination of real and tight"... ah, but BEST of all, True Believers - these cats SCAT! (Heck, Bob Stoloff, whose vocal work is featured here, literally wrote the book on scat - several books, in fact, two of which are still in print and sold by Amazon - check it out!)



This is the album that started my love affair with the Ritz. A few high points? Daryl Bosteels' suavely musical exposition of a wild, eminently raid-able party in "Saturday Night Fish Fry" - the perfect voice for jazz storytelling, flexible and expressive. Tone clusters like bunches of ripe grapes in the gently, sweetly dissonant a cappella "A Child Is Born". The four-at-a-time scat chorus in "Scrapple from the Apple". That wonderful, creative segment of pure vocal percussion in "Ooh Yah". A sultry jazz flute in the playful "Summer Burn". The single sweetest recording of any jazz ballad I've ever heard, in the bittersweet and softly pensive "It Never Entered My Mind". Moments when the voices sound like a soaring horn section... great arrangements by energetic lead vocalist Sharon Broadley (it was never the same without her)... crisply rhythmic vocalese penned by drummer Les Harris, Jr. (who will always be my archetypal image of a jazz percussionist)... the list goes on... and on...



If you can't tell by now that my love affair with The Ritz continues unabated after all these years, if you're not the least bit curious to hear these fine musicians doing their stuff, then alas, I have failed in my task. But I hope I haven't. Check them out - and help keep this great music in print!!"