September 2013
50 Years and Still Going Strong
World Village 450025
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
Can it be? The Swingle Singers are 50 years old, and Weather to Fly is their first 50th-anniversary album. It seems like only yesterday that the brainchild of Ward Swingle swept in from Paris and informed us that Bach and other Baroque composers could be successful with a hot-jazz treatment. The group has gone through a lot of personnel changes in their half century of existence. Ward Swingle left the group to form his own New Swingle Singers and is still alive, back in Paris after a stay in the United States, doing new arrangements and guest conducting.