“String of Pearls” was yet another line item on a long list of missed opportunities for Chicago.
Despite appearing as an obscure bonus track only on the Japanese version of 1995’s Night & Day: Big Band, “String of Pearls” is actually a true return to form. The band hadn’t really delved into instrumentals since their brief “Free Flight” horn chart on 1986’s Chicago 18 or “Playing With Fire” – a strong track from David Foster’s self-titled debut solo album.
If the ballads of the Peter Cetera era were truly the bane of their existence, then a catchy instrumental with a tight Chicago-ized horn chart would have been a positive step in the direction of “taking back” their sound.
Instantly recognizable as a swing classic, “String of Pearls” is also instantly recognizable as a Chicago song: It’s perhaps the ultimate realization of what the band set out to do with the Night and Day album. There’s a synthesis of the old and the “new” Chicago sounds. There are trademark ’70s Chicago horns, but with Bill Champlin’s swinging Hammond organ and a killer guest guitar spot by Bruce Gaitsch.
Cetera’s departure provided Chicago with the perfect opportunity to return to the more adventurous direction they were founded on, or maybe create a marriage of their classic feel with their commercially successful Foster-era sound. Night & Day showed a level of musical adventurousness not truly heard from the band since at least 1982’s Chicago 16 if not since Terry Kath’s passing.
It wet the fans’ appetites for what this incarnation of the band was capable of. Instead of building on that creativity with new original material, however, fans were given new compilations with bonus tracks and Christmas albums for another 11 years.
“String of Pearls” was both an exclamation mark on a brilliant reimagining of big band and swing era classics, and arguably one of the last gasps of creativity from the band – at least until 2006’s Chicago XXX.
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