British revivalist clarinetist and saxophonist Pete Allen leads his band on Running Wild through fourteen chestnuts and an original, “Bechet’s Walk.” The front line is a good one – the young Ben Cummings takes some nice solos, and Allen shows off his suitably dirty-toned and fiery clarinet on “Sweet Sue, Just You” – but the disc has some less attractive aspects too. The vocals are a various but discouraging lot. Susan Valliant Speer sings in a plummy, ersatz manner, tackling everything from the off-colour “The Right Key but the Wrong Keyhole” to a particularly breathless “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” without sounding right for any of them. Moorwood’s vocal on “It Ain’t No Sin . . .” is for some reason artificially antiqued, sounding as if run through a megaphone or gramophone; Allen’s Armstrong imitation on “West End Blues” sounds like it’s being sung by a Muppet. It’s not exactly a subtle rhythm section either, and a dishonourable mention is in order for Geoff Hull’s fairly cacophonous bass work on “Hindustan.” The album ends, for some reason, with a rendition of “I Wanna Be Like You,” the monkeys’ song from Disney’s The Jungle Book.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, November 2002