In this most challenging of times, we need music to lift our spirits and relieve the gloom. Step forward, in all their retro-chic, cabaret-burlesque splendour The Puppini Sisters, with their perfect harmonies and songs that cheer and distract. Their style, and sometimes the songs themselves, are drawn from the dark days of the 1940s, when The Andrews Sisters filled the crackling airwaves with songs such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, their style heavily influenced by an earlier close-harmony sister act, The Boswell Sisters, who came out of the Jazz Age and enlivened the years of the Great Depression.
The Puppinis aren’t in fact sisters and there have been changes of line-up during their 20-year career, but for The Birthday Party, the trio’s seventh studio album, and their birthday tour, founder Marcella Puppini and original band member Kate Mullins have reunited with Rosanna Schura, a very early Puppini Sister who returned briefly in 2016. Along the way, they’ve been categorised as “swingpunk” and “the Spice Girls of jazz” and they have amassed a legion of fans, among them Michael Bublé, with whom they have worked, and King Charles.
The 12 songs selected for their very own birthday party include the Puppinis’ unique reworking of some much-loved classics, among them the Ellington-Strayhorn signature number “Take The A Train”, Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose” and Paul Desmond’s “Take Five”, the biggest-selling jazz single ever, with Desmond’s iconic sax solo, Joe Morello’s nifty drum work, and of course that distinctive 5/4 time signature that gave it its name. “Dream a Little Dream of Me" was in fact written in 1930, but the version best remembered is that by The Mamas and the Papas, Cass Elliot taking the solo, which version seems to have been the inspiration here. Jim Steinman’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was a career-defining hit for Bonnie Tyler. From The Beach Boys’ songbook comes “Kokomo”, while Piero Umiliani’s “Mah Nà Mah Nà" is these days best known from The Muppets and that bastion of political incorrectness The Benny Hill Show. “Happy Birthday” slyly references Marilyn Monroe singing for JFK and Stevie Wonder. To all of them, The Puppini Sisters add their own unique stamp. Two self-penned songs need no explanation: “Hey Sister” and “Postcards from the Road”.
The Puppinis are deftly supported by guitarist, Martin Kolarides, double bassist Henrik Jensen, and drummer Peter Ibbetson.Well-crafted easy listening, and just what the doctor ordered.
