The Emerald City Jazz Kings open their 2012-13 season with Jesse Cloninger on the stand leading an evening dedicated to the debonair English songwriter and bandleader Ray Noble, who wrote such classics as "The Very Thought Of You", "Cherokee", "The Isle of Capri", and "Love Is The Sweetest Thing" and lead two great Swing Era bands in England and the United States before turning to a career on the silver screen.
In the late 1920s Noble became the leader of the New Mayfair Dance Orchestra, an HMV Records studio band that featured some of England’s finest musicians and soon featured South-African vocalist Albert Allick “Al” Bowlly, who quickly became the group’s most popular and recognizable vocalist. The recordings made by Noble, Bowlly, and the New Mayfair Dance Orchestra achieved widespread popularity, both in England and the United States, where several of their smash hit recordings held the no. 1 spot on the Pop Singles Charts: “Love is the Sweetest Thing” (1933, 5 weeks), “Old Spinning Wheel” (1934, 3 weeks), “The Very Thought of You” (1934, 5 weeks), “Isle of Capri” (1935, 7 weeks), “Let's Swing It” (1935, 2 weeks), and “Paris in the Spring” (1935, 1 week).
In 1933 Noble, with Bowlly, moved to New York, where Glenn Miller helped him build form an American band, in which Miller often played, and from 1935 the Ray Noble Orchestra could be heard as the featured ensemble at The Rainbow Room in New York City.
Jesse and the Jazz Kings look back to and capture the magic of Noble's wonderful catalog and to the great repertoire, exquisite vocal stylings, and unique sound of his band on both sides of the Atlantic!
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