Joe Pettitt's LP Swing Orchestra celebrates Frank & Ella in Eastbourne

Joined by Stephen Triffitt and Nicola Emmanuelle, they will be at The Congress Theatre on Sunday, August 6 at 2.30pm for a concert celebrating the two biggest names in jazz and popular music for a generation. You can expect numbers including Fly Me To The Moon, Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, New York New York, Come Fly With Me and ’S Wonderful.

“This is a whole new show,” Joe says. “This came about through working with Nicola. Nicola played the part of Ella Fitzgerald in the West End cast in the Rat Pack musical and she is just so fantastic to work with and the reaction from audiences has been brilliant. I was really keen to keep working with her.”

And he goes back a long way with Stephen. Whenever they got the chance during any easing of the lockdowns they would be performing together: “And Stephen and Nicola are friends anyway and knew each other from working together in the Rat Pack but I didn't just want to put together another tribute act, another Rat Pack show. There are lot of Rat Pack type shows out there and some of them are really good but the fact is it has been done an awful lot, and Stephen and Nicola thought that too. So they don't just come on and play the part of Frank and Ella. The idea is to paint a picture of their careers and the bands that they worked with. It is a celebration these two icons of popular music. They both started off as big band singers and then when they became megastars they worked with people like Duke Ellington and Count Basie and we will do numbers in both those eras and we've also commissioned some new arrangements of a couple of their hits. It is really about showcasing these two great singers. I'm hoping it will be a slightly more highbrow take on them than the Rat Pack shows tend to be. They deserve something more than impersonations. I think the point is that they defined how to sing the Great American Songbook. People would say if ever you want to sing big band music then listen to Frank Sinatra and if you want to take the female voice then just listen to Ella Fitzgerald especially that grin that you can hear in her voice when she sang. There is something very special about that. Plus of course they were friends. They had great magic and there was a great magic about them, and that’s what we want to capture.”

The gig finds the band pretty much back to where it was before the pandemic: “And in large part I think that is down to our two Sky shows that we did which have really upped our profile. But I do think in a sense we're in our own little bubble because of that and the other bands perhaps are struggling a bit more but yes generally I'd say that our audience numbers are back to what they were pre-pandemic. But I was initially little bit disappointed thinking that they would have been higher because of our higher profile now and the fact that we are now ‘that band off TV’ and that we've had a number one in the charts. But look at the picture overall, I am grateful that we are back to where we were.”

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