Newtown’s Roger Ball Bounces Back

With A New Band, Familiar Tunes

By John Voket

Anyone venturing out to Pizzeria Lauretano in Bethel last Sunday evening to enjoy some live jazz music and a fresh pie had to get their order to go, unless they were among the friends and rabid fans who snapped up reservations within an hour of the evening’s headliner being announced.

That headliner was none other than Newtown resident Roger Ball.

The veteran musician, who co-founded and co-wrote the biggest hits for Average White Band, launched a brand new project, The Roger Ball Quintet, before a sold-out house of about 60 friends and supporters in the intimate confines of the restaurant’s front lobby.

Besides Ball, who played alto sax, the group included John Fumasoli on trombone, Nick Bariluk on piano, Thierry Arpino on drums, and Henry Lugo on acoustic bass.

While the group’s selections were funky takes on popular jazz numbers like “Blue Train” and “Come Rain or Come Shine,” they also jammed their way through Ball’s own arrangement of “In A Sentimental Mood” from his  solo album Street Struttin’, and the more recent title track from his album Childsplay.

But certainly the evening’s highlight was a reinvented version of the AWB’s number one hit, “Pick Up The Pieces” which Ball said he decided to add to the set list as an afterthought.

“We weren’t sure that was gonna work,” Ball told The Newtown Bee after the show. “I wasn’t going to do any originals initially, but then I thought why the hell not?”

He said since the full band had never rehearsed together before last Sunday’s live set, he was unsure how his international hit would come off, especially without guitar, and with the added instrumentation of acoustic stand-up bass and trombone.

“And as you heard, it went great,” he said.

Ball admitted that since he left AWB in the early 1980s, he has only played “Pick Up The Pieces” three times before last weekend’s local gig. And that’s because of the effort he said is required to capture the essence of the complicated, horn-driven arrangement.

“Most sax players I have met have played the song at some point, because there are a lot of student arrangements of it, and marching bands used to do it a lot when the song first came out — it’s all over the place,” he said.

Besides the many live renditions of “Pick Up The Pieces,” the number has also been featured in about 15 motion pictures including Superman 2, as well as being picked up as music for a number of television commercials.

“It denotes a period in the mid-‘70s, so when people hear the song they immediately know the action is taking place in that period of time,” he said.

After an extended hiatus from the stage, during which Ball played in a handful of jazz jams, as well as doing commercial gigs and session work, he decided it was time to put a new band of his own together to at least try and pull of a debut show with an eye towards possibly gigging more regularly in the fall.

The other big piece of news from the Ball camp is that this summer, he will reunite with fellow AWB co-founder Malcolm “Molly” Duncan for a one-off show in his homeland of Scotland.

“Molly and the guitar player [Alan Gorrie] from AWB and I were all in a band together before AWB,” Ball said. “So when I found out Molly had this regular job during the summer, I tried to coincide my travels to line up so we could get together. It’s a similar kind of gig from what we just played, a bit bigger band but it’s still two short sets.”

The last time the pair performed together was before Ball split from AWB in 1981.

“We were very close friends at the time, best buddies,” Ball said.

The acclaimed musician is also thinking about doing a larger venue show in the fall to benefit one of his favorite charities, which supports research and programs for individuals with autism. All the proceeds from his latest solo project, 2005’s “Childsplay” are donated to this and other charities.

(A video of The Roger Ball Quintet performing AWB’s “Pick Up The Pieces” is available at NewtownBee.com.)