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SWEET AND HOT is an entertainment which follows the story of jazz through the first half of the twentieth century.
The flexibility afforded by the skills, talents and experience of the band's eleven musicians is exploited to the full in this fast-moving performance: solo ragtime piano, vibrant blues guitar, and hot small bands are heard in their authentic context (New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City etc. in the twenties), building up to the powerful impact of the full orchestra (Harlem and Broadway in the thirties). Marilyn, meanwhile, delivers ballads and "swingers" of the era, as well as a few "risqué" numbers from the blues and vaudeville repertoire.
The show presents as a sumptuous musical banquet, with echoes of Louis Armstrong, Bunk Johnson, Bix Beiderbecke, Scott Joplin, James P Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fats Waller; singers Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Ma Rainey and of course the big band experience of Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford, Cab Calloway, Luis Russell and Fletcher Henderson - amongst many others.
Presentation is fast moving and lively; narrative links by Marilyn and bandleader Paul Munnery are brief and informative, but, above all, entertaining. (A souvenir programme, offering more background information, is available as an optional purchase.)
From the opening number - performed by the orchestra marching into the auditorium as a New Orleans Parade Band - to the red hot finale, audiences are treated to the kind of movement and colour, atmosphere and vitality that are rarely experienced in the normal run of band show. Every detail - orchestration, narrative, staging, costume - has been devised with one aim: to entertain.
Certainly we hope our audiences learn something about the music - but above all we want them to have a good time.