JAZZ REVIEW : Gibbs Gets Disneyland Dancing

Time was when jazz functioned primarily as a music for dancing. A reminder that those days are not entirely gone was the two-night gig at Disneyland’s Plaza Gardens, when the veteran vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, leading his Dream Band, managed to blend ballroom requirements with quality listening.

Given the right tempos, it seemed on Saturday that the older the couples, the wilder the dancing. While the orchestra breezed through Al Cohn’s arrangement of “Jump the Blues Away,” one elderly pair flung each other around as if they were reliving the original jitterbug era.

Bill Holman’s brio-packed versions of “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “I’ll Take Romance” found some of the crowd standing on the dance floor listening. Toward the end of each set, Jack Sheldon contributed a couple of his engaging vocal-and-trumpet specialties.

Gibbs was his perennial exuberant self, raining notes on the mallets for “Fat Man,” a blues riff tune scored by Manny Albam that caught the band’s contagious, Basie-like fire at its spirited best.

Well buttressed by a rhythm section that boasted Lou Levy at the piano, Andy Simpkins on bass and Peter Donald on drums, the arrangements by Marty Paich, Tom Kubis and others were executed with finesse.

Regrettably, the Plaza Gardens band shows that at one time ran seven nights a week are now limited to Fridays and Saturdays, and jazz groups are in a minority.