Delco Nightingale: S’Wingin’ It!

Swingabilly: What a concept! Who’d have ever thought of it? Delco Nightingale, that’s who!

Philadelphia’s Delco Nightingale brings jazz standards mostly from the 1940s together with rockabilly instrumentation and gives us something fresh, fun, and wonderful. And they call it “Swingabilly.” The band’s long-awaited new CD, S’Wingin’ It proves to have been well worth the wait with 12 great presentations of classic jazz swing tunes.

What makes this band so fun to me (and a growing number of other fans!) is the way they’ve taken all of these great old swing tunes and given them a rockabilly-influenced treatment.

Lead singer, Erin Berry can belt out the raucous lines just as easily as she can spread the sugar with the sweet melodies. It’s fun to listen to Berry as she takes you along on a wild rollercoaster ride of vocal gymnastics. She’s got a wonderful voice for this material and has clearly studied the style in order to integrate it into her own delivery. She ranges easily from sweet to sassy, often within the same song. She proves that she’d be just as at home providing smooth and sultry vocals in a romantic nightclub (like she does in the slow introduction to the ultimately in-your-face “Stuff Like That There”) as she would be belting it out for the folks in the cheap seats at the back of a big Broadway theater (as in “I wake Up In The Morning Feeling Fine.”)

The song selection on this record is very cool. The band set out specifically to create a record full of jazz standards. Their promo sheet says, “The initial goal they set for themselves was to bring these cleverly written, fun, and romantic songs not just to nostalgic listeners of big band swing or to cocktail lounge patrons, but also to a new audience whose familiarity with this music was limited to glances of World War II films or flipping through the family record collection.”

Had they stuck with traditional presentations of these songs, they would have simply been echoing the recent efforts of others. Even if they’d augmented the traditional arrangements with rockin’ guitar, they wouldn’t have displayed much originality (has anyone ever heard of the Brian Setzer Orchestra?) Instead, Delco Nightingale exercised a stroke of creative genius and came up with something refreshingly different: Swingabilly.

So just what is Swingabilly? Basically, it’s jazz/swing standards done up with rockabilly instrumentation. A full orchestra stripped down to just a three-piece band and a charismatic vocalist. When I listen to their version of “It’s Magic,” I feel like I understand what Doris Day might have sounded like if she’d have been fed a dose of rock and roll before her recording sessions. This is another song that starts out sweetly enough, but you can’t hold this band back and after the quiet intro, things kick into high gear. And just when they’ve got you going, the pull it back again to finish. Very cool!

Berry carries these tunes with her versatile voice, but she’s far from alone on the record. Guitarist and, along with Berry, the band’s cofounder Greg Phoenix compliments Berry’s vocal lines beautifully as he switches back and forth between jazzy rhythm chord voicing and cutting rockabilly lead lines. He works in, through, and around the vocal lines very cleverly—listen to his chording as he mimics the vocal line in the verses of “I wake Up In the Morning Feeling Fine.” Really nicely done! Another song in which Phoenix particularly shines is the disc’s opener, “Undecided” where he opens the fun with a cool intro, mimics horn stabs throughout, fills in the spaces with a variety of nicely placed licks, and provides a tasteful harmonized solo.

Driving things along is the rhythm section made up of drummer Eddie Everett and upright-up bassist Sean Thomas. Everett tends toward a jazzier shuffling drum style as opposed to a straight-up rockabilly backbeat, but that’s the perfect choice for these songs. Still, he’s present enough keep the dance floor packed and he knows how to establish a backbeat when the song calls for it as he proves in “Stuff Like That There.”

That same song features some great slap-bass work by Thomas who slides comfortably back and forth between cool jazz and manic rockabilly styles throughout the record. Thomas and Everett work very well together and provide the solid basis that enables Phoenix to veer off into his creative lead lines without leaving the listener wondering what happened to the band.

And the band achieves all of this without studio trickery. The record was recorded completely live in studio, so what you hear on the record is pretty well what you can expect to hear when you see the band live. And I think that’s exceptionally cool!

I’ve been waiting for a while to listen to and review this record. I’m happy to report that it was well worth the wait. I’ve been enjoying discovering Swingabilly and this record will be a great addition to the collection of anyone who loves rockabilly and jazz standards alike. For more, check the band out at Reverb Nation.