Cool Club and the Lipker Sisters – [Album]

Cool Club and the Lipker Sisters
Dancing Into Your Dreams
(CD Baby)
One of the recurring pleasures I’ve experienced over the past few years has been attending concerts by Cool Club and the Lipker Sisters. It’s always fun, always energetic, always a tremendous display of musical talent – I catch them whenever I can and, luckily, they play locally often. So I eagerly awaited their new album, Dancing Into Your Dreams, which was released on September 4 and, for the most part, it more than lived up to expectations. It clearly demonstrates their talents both individually and collectively.

The band has two separate components, who joined forces ten years ago. Cool Club is a solid jazz combo which consists of Rick Hoyt – guitarist and main songwriter – drummer Joe Galusha, bassist David Goldstein, and Mark Bradley on saxophone. The Lipker Sisters are, yes, three sisters — Marilla, Grace, and Lizzie — a good generation younger, who have been harmonizing since, as Marilla puts it, they were “little tater tots.” Together, they make quite the team.

Their primary strength, not surprisingly, is the vocal talent of the sisters. Their harmonizing makes an appearance right at the start as they sing “Lovesick Fool” in unison. It reappears throughout the album, notably on “When It Comes to Heartache” and “Goddamn Rock ’n Roll,” but they are also skilled at a variety of backing vocals, whether echoing key lines (“No One Will Ever Know,” “My Baby Got Eyes in the Back of Her Head”), or adding lines to the verses (“Step By Step”). They also use the backing vocals to comment on the lyrical narrative; in “I Can’t Keep From Messin’ Around,” while the lead vocals describe the singer’s lack of control, the backing tells her, “You could if you wanted to.”

They can also belt out a vocal solo as well. Notable examples are “Who Do You Dream About?” a song worthy of Billie Holiday, and the slow blues of “Don’t Make Us Live a Lie,” the one track on here which was recorded live.

All this attention to the vocals should not detract from the skills of The Cool Club. They specialize in, as one of their earlier songs puts it, “Jump Jazz Blues Boogie-Woogie Ragtime and Swing.” That lays down a perfect base of top of which the Sisters to do their thing. They don’t just lay in the background; they throw in a variety of tasteful solos, like the sax on “Step By Step,” “No One Will Ever Know,” and “But You Didn’t.” Rick Hoyt places subtle but catchy guitar lines throughout. Bob Viavattine delivers a sweet trumpet solo on “Who Do You Dream About?” We even get a couple of nice bass solo in “Messin’ Around” and “Goddamn Rock & Roll.”

Hoyt handles the majority of songwriting. He has a taste for turning simple phrases into catchy, entertaining tunes (see some of the above titles). He often has fun with the cliches. In the aforementioned “Messin’ Around,” after the verses offer a non-stop litany of cliched advice, the lead declares “I don’t want to hear another quote!” Hoyt has stated, in shows, that he wrote “But You Didn’t” for the sake of the backing voices, which consist of a series of well-known nonsense syllables — “Papa Oom Mau Mau,” “Shoo Be Doo Be Do,” “Diddy Way Diddy” — just to hear the Sisters sing them.

Marilla Lipker-Gonzalez contributes her own songs to Dancing In Your Dreams as well, bringing a much different style to the music. Several styles, in fact, appear – adding new flavors to the mix. There’s the aforementioned ballad “Who Do You Dream About.” “Lazy Day” is appropriately mellow, while “Losing My Grip” brings in a seductive Latin beat.

Like their live shows, this album is quite playful. The lyrical games of “But You Didn’t” are a great example. Songs like “Messin’ Around,” “When It Comes to Heartache,” and “Eyes in the Back of Her Head” are pure fun. Not only are the lyrics clever, but the Sisters bounce them around in such a way as to emphasize the humor, sometimes backing up the sentiments, sometimes contradicting them.

Still, the album doesn’t quite capture the pure excitement of their live shows. That is the one disappointment. Not that I would expect it to; live performances are their own world, and what they gain in energy is often paid for in sloppiness. Here the intention is clearly to provide the best versions of the songs, and they do succeed at that. It’s a trade-off that’s fine with me.

As if in acknowledgment of this, the group does kick things up a notch on the final cut. I’m not sure if it’s fitting or ironic that, after all this sweet jazz, the album concludes with “Give me some goddamn rock n’ roll!”

Maybe that’s their next album. [G. Murray Thomas]

Artist:
https://www.coolclubandthelipkersisters.com
https://www.facebook.com/CoolClubandtheLipkerSisters
https://www.instagram.com/cclsflx/?hl=en

Album:
Dancing Into Your Dreams is out now. Buy it here, from the band’s official website.

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