Review of James Bond concert in Halifax, Canada

There was a lot of pitched yelling in the James Bond show put together by Ontario’s Jeans ’n’ Classics at the Symphony Nova Scotia Traditional Pops series concert in the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Friday night, reports The Chronicle Herald.

Most of it was pleasant enough, but the intensity of the howling hooks of some 17 Bond and Austin Powers movie theme songs by various hands from Burt Bacharach and Duran Duran to the cutesy swing of Quincy Jones, finally forced me, after 20 minutes into the second half of the show, to shield my ears with a pair of musician’s ear-plugs, tuned to filter out 15 decibels of sound pressure.

It was a relief, though I had to ease the plugs out every now and then to absorb the kind of unfiltered sound everyone else was hearing.

To judge from the audience response, I alone suffered. The full house gave what I agree was a well-deserved standing ovation to Jeans ’n’ Classics arranger/guitarist Peter Brennan, bassist Kevin Ewer, drummer Jeff Christmas, pianist and emcee John Regan, with the forceful Rique (Rickie) Franks and the altogether amazing Neil Donell on the vocals.

By now the Bond themes have been so much repeated, and so much imitated, they sound derivative — imitations of themselves.

Certainly the opening instrumental James Bond Theme music is a blood relative of Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn TV theme with the identical and still effective — if a little corny by now — musical imagery: a gutsy, funky, repetitive bass line of no more than four or five closely grouped notes into which sudden bursts of dissonant, jazzy chords knife in like nosebleeds from high brass and woodwinds.

The themes themselves are often tuneful in bits and pieces with uniformly sexy lyrics and suggestive climactic bayings at the moon. But the best and most well-written music of the night was Paul and Linda McCartney’s Live and Let Die.

The hit of the performance was Donnell, whose vocal versatility is astonishing.

First he sang like Tom Jones in Thunderball — a more than passing-good imitation of the Jones tone and style. Then he sounded lilke Louis Armstrong in We Have All The Time in the World — the only Bond movie in which James marries the girl, only to have her die on him.

Donnell’s final hook on Duran Duran’s A View to a Kill was so high and so fine and so penetrating it brought down the house like an Italian tenor on the brink of killing himself for love.

Franks sang with a great deal of power in You Only Live Twice and Never Say Never Again, her voice showing an affecting fragility around the edges of her belt register. Her pitch sagged disastrously on Nobody Does It Better just before the intermission. But she recovered and sang well again on the second half.

Regan’s witty introductions and piano playing (admittedly inaudible in the amplified climaxes), set things up for Brennan, Ewer and Christmas to keep up the drive and energy.

The symphony under the direction of resident conductor Dinuk Wijeratne provided simple but effective harmonies, exotic fills and somewhat volcanic climaxes by Brennan, who arranged all or most of the music.

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