Jazz : ‘Jump for Joy’ Doesn’t Quite Sing in Culver City

The highlight of the 10th annual Duke Ellington Conference promised to be a retrospective of the much-praised but rarely heard musical revue “Jump for Joy.” Both the weekend timing and the location seemed right, since the work was originally staged 50 years ago in Los Angeles.

Saturday night’s program at the Pacifica Hotel in Culver City, however, never quite recovered the essence of what must have been, for 1941, a remarkable achievement with its strikingly bold expression of black pride.

Only two of the vocal numbers--Paula Kelly’s atmospheric reading of “Chocolate Shake” and Skip Cunningham’s buoyantly outspoken rendition of “I’ve Got a Passport From Georgia”--managed to suggest the style, the energy and the attitude of the period.

But Barbara McNair, who was featured in a 1959 revival of the “Jump for Joy,” missed the point of the show’s hit number “I Got It Bad” with an interpretation that verged on somnolence. Herb Jeffries, who was in the original production, and whose voice sounds as good as ever, buttoned off the presentation with a sprightly up-tempo romp through the title number.

Appropriately, perhaps, the evening’s most successful moments--even though they were not all from “Jump for Joy”--came with the instrumental performances of Bill Berry’s L.A. Big Band and the instrumental-styled vocalizing of Don and Alicia Cunningham. The Berry ensemble sounded especially Ellingtonesque on the whimsical “Concerto for Clinkers” and the prototypical “Harlem Airshaft.” The underappreciated Cunninghams, as always, furnished brief, but accurate illustrations of nonstop swinging.

The conference, which continued through Sunday, also included a series of seminars as well as a concert by the Tom Talbert Jazz Orchestra and a bus tour of significant Ellington-related locations.