Jonny Cooper

The Jonny Cooper Orchestra: Legends of Swing

by Jack Bowers
May 1, 2002

The Jonny Cooper Orchestra is an American–style dance band from South Africa, of all places, and a fairly decent one at that. On Legends of Swing, which we presume is the orchestra’s recorded debut, trumpeter Cooper and his comrades pay tribute to bandleaders Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Harry James, Jazz pathfinder Louis Armstrong, vocalist Ella Fitzgerald and composer Earle Hagen. Even though the charts are unremarkable and the orchestra unassuming, the music is ...