The Man Overboard Quintet brings together five like-minded musicians who play and listen to all sorts of music, and who share a love of hot swing. The title of their new collection, “Down in the deep deep blue”, comes from the Isham Jones' song ‘I Hate Myself for Being So Mean to You’, describing the place where the protagonist intends to ‘drown’ (or in some versions to ‘hide’) himself. The album as a whole steers away from more famous names in the American songbook, delving deeper under the surface to include such songs as What a Little Moonlight Can Do by Charles M. Woods from 1937, J.C. Johnson's prohibition song Me and My Gin from 1928 and Victoria Spivey's Dirty TB Blues from 1929, inspired by a tuberculosis epidemic. The earliest song in the collection here is an exception – it came not from America, but from the UK. The English composer Philip Braham wrote the music for Limehouse Blues for a revue starring Gertrude Lawrence in 1922. Man Overboard Quintet's first album, All Hands On Deck [CHRCD062] was a huge success. “Violin playing worthy of Grappelli on a disc of pre-war swing tunes.” (The Strad) “Just imagine, if Grappelli and Goodman had got together, what the end product would have sounded like!” (bebopspokenhere)
