
The great old songs are alive and well for 2020 and they’ll be ushered into a new decade in style January 17 & 18 at Center Stage Theatre in Shelton with a full weekend of live appearances by The Kevin Saint James Band. This 2‑night engagement will mark the band’s first appearance at Center Stage.
An all-star collective of New Haven area Jazz musicians that features the Elm City’s premier “saloon-singer” Kevin Saint James, the band performs timeless classic selections from the Great American Songbook in a variety of artistic styles with a rare balance of musically “scientific” re-invention and profound reverence for historic significance and tradition.
Come enjoy ageless favorites from Cole Porter, Fats Waller, George Gershwin, Rogers & Hart, Billy Strayhorn, Jerome Kern and many others – long ago immortalized by legendary artists like Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Bobby Darin, Louis Prima and Ray Charles are heard again in resounding chorus as the band reworks and relives the classics.
Benefitting from their many years of shared collaboration and familiarity with their chosen material, the band has a genuinely unique capacity for working spontaneous experimentation into their respectful reinterpretations of familiar popular standards that transport more mature audiences back in time to the sounds of days long ago, while recreating, re-introducing and perhaps even endearing these precious melodies to younger listeners at the same time.
Kevin Saint James is and has been a regular fixture on the live local music landscape of the New Haven area for over 25 years. Widely recognized as an infinitely versatile vocalist and characteristically charismatic entertainer, he’s worked with some of the area’s finer bands and musicians in a wide range of musical genres – from Blues to Roots-based Americana and Soul music, to classic Rock and Rhythm & Blues – and always throughout – singing traditional, old-time, stone-cold straight-up Jazz.
Over the course of the last 20 years, in various combinations, the respective members of The Kevin Saint James Band have performed together in and around the greater New Haven area at Cafe Nine, Christopher Martin’s, Owl Shop, Cave A Vin, The 9th Note, Old School Saloon, Trinity Bar and Park Central Tavern in Hamden. Several years ago they played on the grand stage at historic Lyric Hall in Westville – video of which is available to view on YouTube and on Facebook.
Always eager to spread the love of classic Jazz music onward to new frontiers, The Kevin Saint James Band is grateful for the opportunity to spend a weekend entertaining the as-yet-unacquainted fellow music aficionados who regularly support and patronize Center Stage Theatre. Whether or not people will know every song by heart, or if they’ve only heard them in old movies or TV commercials, we hope we can win them over with the greatest classics from the Golden Age of American music and provide Shelton’s number one live audience with a musical cabaret experience that they’ll remember enjoying as much as we’ll enjoy bringing it out there for them.
Visit our website http://www.centerstageshelton.org or call our box office 203 – 225-6079.