Kiggins gets in the swing for Mom’s Day

Hair don’t mean boo if it ain’t got that goo!

There’s your Mother’s Day mission statement, a slight revision of a Duke Ellington tune, from downtown Vancouver hair designer Garret Olmstead and fashion guru Alisa Tetreault. Olmstead and Tetreault have ginned up a stylish, two-day Mother’s Day celebration at the Kiggins Theatre that’ll be the perfect occasion for putting on the Ritz — featuring a live jazz orchestra, choreographed swing dancing and screenings of a zany 1930s musical.

While it’s not actually mandatory for gentlemen to slick their hair back with Olmstead’s pomades, nor for ladies to get dolled up in one of Tetreault’s stylish dresses — it sure would add to the fun.

Vintage is their business. From her Most Everything Vintage shop on Washington Street, Tetreault has spent the last few years building a base of fashionable clients and themed-event attendees who hunger for appropriate costumes. She’s outfitted people heading for everything from 1980s hair-metal dances to Disney princess parties (for grown-ups), she said.

But, “Classic vintage of the old-school, Hollywood style is my real passion,” she said. That means the carefully and lovingly made fashions of the 1920s through the 1960s — “when everything was tailored beautifully, made in the USA and made to last,” she said.

Even in the casual Pacific Northwest, where plaid shirts, blue jeans and hiking boots are as common as traffic jams on the Interstate 5 Bridge, some people yearn to turn heads with Jazz Age looks. They only wish they had a real reason, Tetreault said; they’re the ones who love her shop but wonder aloud: “What do I do when I’m dressed up like this? Where can I go dancing to vintage music?”

Fortunately, answers keep walking into Tetreault’s store. First came Olmstead, the co-owner of Locksmyth Salon, whose similar passion is classic gentlemen’s hairdos. He enlisted Tetreault to outfit a model for a marketing photo shoot highlighting Olmstead’s homemade pomades, which are great for slicking, sculpting and holding hair. The outing became a brainstorming session about slicking and sculpting the whole vintage scene in downtown Vancouver — in time for Mother’s Day, the new partners decided.

Gifting Mom, the woman who already has everything, can be tough on that special day, Tetreault said; but what Mom wouldn’t enjoy a swing down memory lane?

Elegant and berserk

Another answer to the vintage riddle is Sammuel Murry-Hawkins, a Vancouver musician and singer with parallel passions. Swing dancing may be a resurgent trend these days — as we see in the popularity of “Alive and Kicking,” a new documentary film — but Murry-Hawkins and a couple of old-fashioned musical associates realized that a “fully orchestrated, traditional dance band playing the sweet and hot music” of the 1920s and 1930s was still missing from the Pacific Northwest, he said.

So they launched the Ne Plus Ultra Jass Orchestra — borrowing a popular phrase, and vintage spelling, from musicians of the early 20th century. “Ne Plus Ultra” literally means “no further beyond,” that is, the ultimate! The 12-piece band includes tuba, banjo, trombone, coronets, reeds, violin, percussion and piano, plus the singing Tritone Trio, a male vocal group.

Their emphasis is more on beautiful playing than wild improvisation. “The sound is so lush and elegant, the genre is really a combination of classical and jazz,” Murry-Hawkins said. (The Ne Plus Ultra Jass Orchestra also plays a monthly concert at 7 p.m., every third Thursday, at The Village Ballroom, 704 N.E. Dekum St., Portland. Admission is $10.)

While the orchestra plays, Vancouver ballroom dance instructor Zef Aidan Wolf — who specializes in vintage such as the foxtrot, jitterbug, Lindy Hop, and Charleston — will lead a group of local dance instructors in a choreographed swing-dance extravaganza that’ll be both impressive and inviting.

“It will be stuff we could literally teach anyone to do,” Wolf said.

The Kiggins sells beer and wine from its upstairs lounge, and tonight (May 12) only, before all the other festivities get underway, there’ll be live entertainment up there by The Juleps, a singing trio in the style of the Andrews Sisters.

Finally, you can settle into your seat for “College Swing,” a 1938 movie musical about a school that goes jazzily berserk after Gracie Allen becomes its Dean of Men. Reviews tend to agree that the plot of “College Swing” is a joke, but the onscreen talents of Allen, George Burns, Martha Raye and Bob Hope make it a winner anyway.