Toward the end of the Jazz Age, the music world ushered in a new phenomenon: the all-girl band.
Connecticut’s contribution was the Novelty Syncopators, a New Britain-based group formed in the late 1920s by sisters Ruth and Katherine Wacker.
Pianist John Brighenti, known to some from weekly gigs at Vito’s in Wethersfield, is the son of the late singer Angeline Battistone, who performed with the Novelty Syncopators from 1930 to 1937. Brighenti, and his wife, Liz, are the keepers of Angeline’s musical legacy.
“Little Miss Angie does the thrush stuff at the Arlington Arms,” famed newspaper columnist Walter Winchell wrote in 1935, referring to Marty and Jimmer Walsh’s now-defunct club on New Britain’s Main Street, “and she’s helped along by the Novelty Syncopators, who are female musickers.”
And yet, after nearly a decade of professional music-making, Angeline quit the business forever. Aside from a handful of informal appearances, she never performed in public again.
“She wanted to get married,” says Brighenti, who lives in Avon. “She wondered sometimes what life would be like if she hadn’t stopped performing.”
Angeline’s story, worth revisiting during Women’s History Month, is a familiar one. At the start of the Great Depression, female singers and instrumentalists, pushed out of the workplace by men into creative realms, banded together in rhythm, song and low-cut costumes, leaving the parlor for the public stage and dancehall.
By the mid-’40s, however, most all-girl bands had retreated, nudged back out of the spotlight by returning World War II musicians. (This later era is captured brilliantly in the 2011 documentary “The Girls in the Band.”)
Angeline’s introduction to music came early, when her parents — immigrants from Northern Italy — bought a player piano. She taught herself to play by following along with the rolls, developing an almost machine-like sense of timing.
At 9, Angeline fronted a band at Foot Guard Hall in Hartford (a venue once referred to as the “Bushnell before the Bushnell”), singing without a microphone.
“She had a powerful voice,” Brighenti says. “I’ve heard her sing that way many times.”
Angeline’s talent was obvious. She’d hear a song on the radio and could jot down solfege syllables and lyrics in real time, for future reference.
“She almost broke the machine when they tested her hearing. She had absolute pitch, but she never took a lesson,” Brighenti says. “She was so quick.”
Battistone also learned that talent has value. She bought a pair of roller skates with her own money, after performing at a Bricklayer’s party in Windsor. Soon, she’d taught herself how to play the accordion, banjo and drums. (A 1930 picture of the Novelty Syncopators shows Battistone with a trumpet in her lap, but Brighenti never heard her play one.)
In the 1930s, Battistone and the Novelty Syncopators worked four nights a week at the Arlington Arms, playing and singing standards like “Solitude,” “Stormy Weather” and “When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along).”
Angeline’s father (Brighenti’s grandfather) had reservations about letting his daughter perform. He told club owners to keep an eye on the girls. Male patrons who made passes got bounced.
Battistone gravitated toward Tin Pan Alley composer Harry Warren (“Lulu’s Back in Town,” “42nd Street”) and singer Jo Stafford. On the side, she worked on a shade tobacco farm in Windsor and did small jobs as a seamstress.
Despite the word “novelty,” the Syncopators were serious players. One night, in 1934, singer Rudy Vallee’s agent caught the Syncopators at the Arlington Arms. After the show, he invited Angeline to New York, offering to provide further training and performing opportunities. “He said, ‘You’ve got that voice,'” Brighenti says.
Battistone turned him down.
Another time, two men entered the Arms. One started teaching the other how to dance. “They were dancing like farmers,” Brighenti recalls his mother explaining. “It was my father [John Sr.] teaching his best friend.”
In New Britain, the Battistones lived near the Brighentis. John Sr. was a tool and die maker by trade, who later got into commercial construction. “I’m glad he was mechanical,” Brighenti says. “He didn’t want me to work with anything mechanical because of my fingers. I got off easy that way.”
Brighenti, who turns 73 in March, earned a bachelor of arts in music education from the Hartt College of Music in 1967, with minors in piano performance and music theory. In 1975, he studied piano in New York with Lennie Tristano before touring the U.S. with the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
When the group broke up, Battistone didn’t keep in touch with the other women. (Brighenti only met one member: drummer Mary Cote (Taylor), who died in 2008.)
Angeline, Brighenti says, “started living vicariously through me. She was behind me so much. It made her feel good that I’d achieved some level of success.” As Brighenti’s career took off, his mother was his best critic. “She’d tell me if the timing wasn’t right or if I hit a wrong note.”
Battistone sometimes entertained family members and friends at picnics, accompanying herself on the accordion. Brighenti heard Angeline sing with a band only once: with New Britain entertainer Manuel Shimansky, who performed as Chubby Clark. (Shimansky passed away in 2016 at 90 years old.)
“She really impressed me,” Brighenti says. “She was a different singer with a group.”
Battistone suffered a stroke in 1987, when she was 76. She passed away in 2004.
One night in 1986, however, Angeline played “Ciribiribin,” a famous Italian song that served as bandleader Harry James’ theme song in the 1940s, on the piano. Halfway through, she broke into a rollicking stride feel. Brighenti’s cassette of the performance is the only known recording of his mother.
As we listen to Angeline’s stride, Brighenti remembers a comment by Ray Cassarino, one of his instructors at the Hartford Conservatory of Music, who met Angeline in the 1970s.
“She sat down and played for him, all these Tin Pan Alley songs and Italian songs,” Brighenti says.
Cassarino’s response: “Perfect timing.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct that John Brighenti lives in Avon.
