Sound Venture – GEORGIE FAME***

Many Happy Returns/Down For The Count/Its For Love The Petals Fall/I Am Missing You/Funny How Time Slips Away/Lil’ Pony/Lovey Dovey/Lil’ Darlin’/Three Blind Mice/Dawn Yawn/Feed Me/Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag

Sound Venture found blues and jazz musician Georgie Fame team up with the Harry South Orchestra and some of the hottest names in British jazz to create an album of big band sounds. (UK:9)

"Featuring many of the Britain’s top jazz musicians, and arranged by leading big band arranger Harry South, the album was a break from Fame’s earlier R & B hits."

"He started off tenderly with Many Happy Returns, his own catchy melody in a 6/8-rhythm, a romance for the wee hours in an early Sinatra-style. Down For The Count lives up to its title, because here the young musical director really swings free and easy. I Am Missing You presents more lovesick thoughts, a slow swing Georgie really seems to feel at home in. Lovey Dovey presents some more relaxed swing, the singer totally at ease."

"He was just beginning to settle down into a more comfortable, and certainly less hell-raisingly energetic mood as he hit his fourth album, and Sound Venture - his second successive British top tenner - does slow down accordingly. But only in comparison with its barnstorming predecessors. Any album, after all, that includes covers of King Curtis' Lovey Dovey and James Brown's Papa's Got A Brand New Bag is hardly going to lie quietly on the turntable, while the wealth of Fame originals were restrained only in the absence of his Blue Flames to truly stir things up."

"There is little indication that this was the same man who recently hit the charts with an innocuous version of Sunny, although the album's success certainly rode on the back of that hit. And, if his subsequent albums did fall more fully into the realm of pop, easy listening Sound Venture at least stands at the harder hitting end of the bridge its maker was crossing - a sound venture indeed."

"Sound Venture showed Georgie to be the hippest cat in town with a band featuring Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott and many of the hottest names of British jazz. The cut Dawn Yawn, from that album, written by Georgie, is a masterpiece describing a trawl through Soho clubs and the melancholia of an early morning trip home."

"My favourite is a very soulful rendition of Nelson's Funny How Time Slips Away."