A Crooked Thing
A Chronicle of Beggar's Holiday, Part One
Oh, love is a crooked thing
And there is nobody can say
All the curious things there are in it
"Brown Penny"
Posterity is as unkind to failures on Broadway as it is elsewhere. No matter what virtues a play or musical may possess, box-office success seems to be the only criterion of whether or not a dramatic work will survive in our memory. For every season's Oklahoma! or My Fair Lady, there are any number of worthies that, for one reason or another, simply didn't catch on with the mass audience. Such was the fate of Beggar's Holiday, the lavish musical comedy of 1946-47 that featured the melodies of Duke Ellington and the lyrics and libretto of John Latouche.
The play opened with great fanfare at the Broadway Theatre in New York the day after Christmas, 1946, and closed some fourteen weeks later, after a disappointing 108 performances. Nevertheless, it was a production of many outstanding qualities, coming as it did in reaction against the optimistic claptrap which soon became the norm among Broadway hits. It boasted a fine cast; it had a distinguished director, a nonpareil set design; and, in the hands of its producers, it had money to burn. In fact, it had all the ingredients of a successful show.
Beggar's Holiday began in the imagination of black producer Perry Watkins, who was the only black member of the local Scenic Designers Union. Watkins had received renown as the designer of the WPA's Negro Theatre Project's first production, Macbeth, at the Lafayette Theatre in 1935, as well as the Federal Theatre's Pinocchio and Guthrie McClintic's production of Mamba's Daughters. Beggar's Holiday, he wrote, "was conceived from the first-- more than a year before it reached Broadway-- as a bi-racial musical."1
Admittedly, featuring black writers and performers and Afro-American themes was not unknown on Broadway in the immediate post-World War II period. The musical Street Scene, with lyrics by Langston Hughes, ran the same season. Other plays with Negro themes included On Whitman Avenue (with Canada Lee) and the Katherine Dunham Company's Bal Negrej. Following the lead of Beggar's Holiday, Finian's Rainbow featured a mixed cast in a portion of the show which satirized Southern-style white supremacism.
This was a Broadway still waltzing through the euphoric dreamland of the Four Freedoms. It was therefore not surprising that someone would come up with the bright idea of showing racial democracy I'm action. All these shows, to one degree or another, were charming exercises in make-believe, perhaps all the more charming because of their naivety. In those days, just having black and white actors occupy the same stage, other than in a servant-master relationship, was an occasion of extraordinary open-mindedness. On the other hand, presenting something as unheard-of as an onstage interracial romance-- as did Beggar's Holiday-- was a gesture in the direction of sophisticated and sincere wishful thinkers.
Beggar's Holiday, however, was different from the other interracial plays in the depth of Perry Watkins's conception. His paramount objective was to make a social and political statement, to prove that a Broadway production could be borne equally by the talents of black and white. "No one realized until opening night," Watkins later wrote, "that it was to become the first completely biracial production in the history of the American theatre... from production staff, authors and orchestrators, stars and supporting cast, singers and dancers, down to the musicians in the pit."2
As such, the show must be viewed as a statement by and for the political left, caught inexorably between the hazy nirvana wartime "unity" and the coming show-business blacklist. In a sense, Beggar's Holiday was the left's last hurrah before the plague years of the 1950s; it is doubtful whether a single participant in the show was not affected to some degree by the red-hunts of that epoch, and several suffered a great deal.
Nevertheless, Beggar's Holiday was not a problem play in the conventional sense, least of all one about race problems. Instead, Watkins envisioned
... a gay satire suggested in modern parallels to the 18th century of John Gay's popular classic, "The Beggar's Opera," and translated into the idiom and tempo of today's America.3
By making it bi-racial, Watkins explained:
... it expressed the integrated cross-sectional spirit of the true American scene... The collaboration is a proof of the universal character of the arts and artists of the theatre. It also shows that democracy works. The harmonious relationships among all concerned and the success of the venture indicate that intelligent Americans regard color as no barrier to artistic cooperation along more general lines for the common good of all Americans.4
With all this in mind, Watkins and co-producer Dale Wasserman first approached John Treville Latouche, a twenty-eight-year-old Virginian who had already established an enviable track record as a lyricist and was still a young, earnest firebrand. In 1935, at the age of eighteen, Latouche had collaborated with composer Earl Robinson on the mordant "Ballad of Uncle Sam," which was conceived as the finale to the WPA revue, Sing for Your Supper. Almost from its beginning one of Paul Robeson's concert pieces, "Ballad of Uncle Sam" achieved sufficient notoriety to come to the attention of right-wingers in Congress who condemned it as evidence of "communist infiltration of the WPA."5
In 1940, Latouche wrote the lyrics to Vernon Duke's score for the stage production of Cabin in the Sky, firmly establishing his credentials as a writer for the musical theatre. In 1942, again collaborating with Vernon Duke, he wrote the ill-fated The Lady Comes Across. The composer, in describing Latouche as having "unquenchable but ill-defined ambition," said, "He was very small, dark and stocky, with the face of a precocious infant. Johnny's mind was ever alert, his wit ever-sharp and often merciless; but the boy's essential goodness and kindness shone through his eyes. Extremely erratic by nature, Latouche worked spasmodically and swiftly on his poetry; short periods of work to be followed by long days and nights of blissful laziness and idle gallivanting."6
By 1945 Latouche was already a veteran and something of a celebrity of the Broadway stage. In the late autumn of that year, he began, under Watkins's guidance, to fashion his updated treatment of The Beggar's Opera.
From the John Gay original of 1728, several borrowings were obvious from the start, chiefly the satiric theme: the bourgeois and the criminal share the same vices and are, essentially, identical. Latouche's characters were lifted ready-made from the stock figures who peopled Gay's play. In Macheath, the amorous and wily gangster, he hit upon a character with electrifying appeal to jaded theatre audiences, weary of cliches about crime and punishment and ready for the "anti-hero," so well portrayed in the Hollywood film noir of this same postwar period; as one of Latouche's barbed lyrics had it:
Girls want a hero
Who's a cross between a Dillinger and Nero
A hard-boiled guy who has murder in his eye
And a pulse that never rises over zero.
In 1940, Latouche wrote the lyrics to Vernon Duke's score for the stage production of Cabin in the Sky, firmly establishing his credentials as a writer for the musical theatre. In 1942, again collaborating with Vernon Duke, he wrote the ill-fated The Lady Comes Across. The composer, in describing Latouche as having "unquenchable but ill-defined ambition," said, "He was very small, dark and stocky, with the face of a precocious infant. Johnny's mind was ever alert, his wit ever-sharp and often merciless; but the boy's essential goodness and kindness shone through his eyes. Extremely erratic by nature, Latouche worked spasmodically and swiftly on his poetry; short periods of work to be followed by long days and nights of blissful laziness and idle gallivanting."6
By 1945 Latouche was already a veteran and something of a celebrity of the Broadway stage. In the late autumn of that year, he began, under Watkins's guidance, to fashion his updated treatment of The Beggar's Opera.
John Latouche
From the John Gay original of 1728, several borrowings were obvious from the start, chiefly the satiric theme: the bourgeois and the criminal share the same vices and are, essentially, identical. Latouche's characters were lifted ready-made from the stock figures who peopled Gay's play. In Macheath, the amorous and wily gangster, he hit upon a character with electrifying appeal to jaded theatre audiences, weary of cliches about crime and punishment and ready for the "anti-hero," so well portrayed in the Hollywood film noir of this same postwar period; as one of Latouche's barbed lyrics had it:
Girls want a hero
Who's a cross between a Dillinger and Nero
A hard-boiled guy who has murder in his eye
And a pulse that never rises over zero.
Likewise, Latouche took the rest of Gay's gamut of characters, from the outlaws to the in-laws; the politician Peachum and his daughter Polly; Lockit and his daughter Lucy, a chief of police and a whore, respectively; the madam Jenny and the thief Sneaky Pete (Filch in the original), and so on. Also preserved was the Beggar character who served, as in the original, as narrator and interlocutor.7
Latouche saddled his first draft with the tame title Street Music. In the original version of Act I, the Beggar sets the required tone of moral ambiguity, accompanying himself on guitar with "In Between":
Between the twilight and the nightfall
There's a time that's outside of time
When you feel yourself standing nowhere at all
And you watch the shadows lazily climb
Where there once was the sun
And now there is none.8
By a series of songs and dances, we are introduced to the other characters: "A Guy Name of Macheath," "Git Out" (Jenny), "When I Walk With You" (Macheath and Polly, the dominant romantic ballad of the show.9 We meet the colorful denizens of Macheath's gang and Lucy's whorehouse through a series of numbers, including "TNT," sung by the Cocoa Girl:
Auntie's in the loony bin
Uncle's on the drink
Granny's in the graveyard but
I'm in the pink
The folks are doing fine, you see
So baby, see me for your TNT.
Some of the best lyrics wound up sacrificed to the exigencies of production, among them the verse to "Loose Living":
I lunch on the succulent olives
That grow in a martini dry
The cherries that batten within a Manhattan
Bring a bright, rosy flush to my eye.
The fruit in a double old-fashioned
Keeps my golden tresses in curl,
For snacks at odd hours,
Oranges from whiskey sours
Help me to be a healthy American girl!
The middle scenes of the first act introduce the heavies, the shady politico Hamilton Peachum, his unabashed Mrs. ("Nothing Is More Respectable than a Reformed Whore") and the corrupt police chief, Lockit. They are played, even in the tensest situations, as comic characters, generally with satiric patter, slapstick routines, and intricate two- or three-part song arrangements. Among the latter, many are done in the manner of recitative ("Scrimmage," "Ore from a Goldmine," etc.), while others are cleverly pantomimed to the tune of musical instruments, with the bassoon and piccolo articulating a quarrel between Peachum and Lockit as they plot the sensational arrest of Macheath as a smokescreen to hide their own nefarious activities.
The first act ends with the hobo jungle scene, where Macheath's gang has gone into hiding and where, presently, they are joined by the entire company of doxies from Lucy's whorehouse. The plot development here, of course, is the betrayal of Macheath by Lucy and Mac's arrest, but the scene is most significant in its song and dance numbers, which include the poignant "On the Wrong Side of the Railroad Tracks" and the sly "Rooster Man," with its cock-and-hen rhumba accompaniment.
One clever lyric, later dropped from the show, celebrated the virtues of gang life while putting down the "straight life":
You wake up and breakfast on a cigarette,
A cup of bitter coffee and a bun.
You rush for a trolley that you never get;
When you do, it's an overcrowded one.
You push through a mob when you reach your street,
The elevator man don't say hello.
Then you chatter with the customers, so cordial and so sweet,
The kind of dopes you'd never want to know.
So you fret and you get in an awful stew,
And develop indigestion and a breakdown or two,
And you sleep with the nightmares ridin' over you,
And you struggle to a movie, and the ushers make cracks,
And you overpay your doctor just to tell you to relax.
How ducky!
Who lucky?
It must be me.
When you feel yourself standing nowhere at all
And you watch the shadows lazily climb
Where there once was the sun
And now there is none.8
By a series of songs and dances, we are introduced to the other characters: "A Guy Name of Macheath," "Git Out" (Jenny), "When I Walk With You" (Macheath and Polly, the dominant romantic ballad of the show.9 We meet the colorful denizens of Macheath's gang and Lucy's whorehouse through a series of numbers, including "TNT," sung by the Cocoa Girl:
Auntie's in the loony bin
Uncle's on the drink
Granny's in the graveyard but
I'm in the pink
The folks are doing fine, you see
So baby, see me for your TNT.
Some of the best lyrics wound up sacrificed to the exigencies of production, among them the verse to "Loose Living":
I lunch on the succulent olives
That grow in a martini dry
The cherries that batten within a Manhattan
Bring a bright, rosy flush to my eye.
The fruit in a double old-fashioned
Keeps my golden tresses in curl,
For snacks at odd hours,
Oranges from whiskey sours
Help me to be a healthy American girl!
The middle scenes of the first act introduce the heavies, the shady politico Hamilton Peachum, his unabashed Mrs. ("Nothing Is More Respectable than a Reformed Whore") and the corrupt police chief, Lockit. They are played, even in the tensest situations, as comic characters, generally with satiric patter, slapstick routines, and intricate two- or three-part song arrangements. Among the latter, many are done in the manner of recitative ("Scrimmage," "Ore from a Goldmine," etc.), while others are cleverly pantomimed to the tune of musical instruments, with the bassoon and piccolo articulating a quarrel between Peachum and Lockit as they plot the sensational arrest of Macheath as a smokescreen to hide their own nefarious activities.
The first act ends with the hobo jungle scene, where Macheath's gang has gone into hiding and where, presently, they are joined by the entire company of doxies from Lucy's whorehouse. The plot development here, of course, is the betrayal of Macheath by Lucy and Mac's arrest, but the scene is most significant in its song and dance numbers, which include the poignant "On the Wrong Side of the Railroad Tracks" and the sly "Rooster Man," with its cock-and-hen rhumba accompaniment.
One clever lyric, later dropped from the show, celebrated the virtues of gang life while putting down the "straight life":
You wake up and breakfast on a cigarette,
A cup of bitter coffee and a bun.
You rush for a trolley that you never get;
When you do, it's an overcrowded one.
You push through a mob when you reach your street,
The elevator man don't say hello.
Then you chatter with the customers, so cordial and so sweet,
The kind of dopes you'd never want to know.
So you fret and you get in an awful stew,
And develop indigestion and a breakdown or two,
And you sleep with the nightmares ridin' over you,
And you struggle to a movie, and the ushers make cracks,
And you overpay your doctor just to tell you to relax.
How ducky!
Who lucky?
It must be me.
The second act, beginning with Macheath's jailbreak and concluding with his entrapment, re-arrest and execution, offers less in the way of memorable song material. Such numbers in the first draft as "Boll Weevil" and "True Love Is Not an Atonement" were quickly abandoned, along with a gem of a number in which jailbirds voice their new-found satisfaction with life:
We don't want the wings of an angel,
We don't want the wings of a dove.
Don't wanna rise and shine like a B-29,
'Cause the jailhouse is the place we love.
We're sure of a roof when it's rainy,
We're certain of three meals a day.
The white and the black have a shirt on their back,
Which is more than honest people can say.
A little further on, another song, sung by Chief Lockit and also unfortunately deleted, comments on the show's philosophical underpinnings:
When you criticize this age
Do it discreetly.
Always sugar-coat your rage--
And cut throats sweetly.
There's a nervous little ghost
In every attic;
So with anyone you roast
Be diplomatic!
Though your phrases may be vague as can be,
Everyone will say, "the bastard's gunning for me!"
Other songs, including the trenchant "Lullaby for Junior," the witty "Women" (which eventually was assigned to the character Careless Love, as Sneaky Pete came to be renamed), and the beautiful and wistful "Brown Penny" (so used for both a coin-toss situation and Lucy's color) managed to survive the rigors of rehearsal and made their way into the Broadway production. All in all, Beggar's Holiday started out with a promising set of lyrics. All it needed was a musical score to match.
By the late summer of 1946, Latouche had completed a typescript to go into rehearsals with. Despite a number of serious flaws, particularly in the second act, his lyrics and libretto provided a witty and effective commentary on the modern city Big Time, particularly when wedded to music by that most quintessentially urban of modern composers, Duke Ellington.
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| Duke Ellington
Ellington, now approaching the twentieth anniversary of his Cotton Club debut,
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To some American critics he is the genius of his time, born to glorify Negro music. But to others, equally articulate, he is a figure grown fat with commercial success, a great jazzman who sold his music out to rehearsed arrangements and concert-hall pretensions.
To the latter accusation, Duke could do little but protest that his music had never really changed. "I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything," he said. "We're playing the way we feel like. Some of our pieces are just more extended and the ornamentation more mature." In truth, most of the "extended" works in Ellington's concert repertory consisted of short pieces linked by one means or another into the form of a "suite." Moreover, at this point in his career, Ellington was long past any fundamental changes.
True, like other bands engaged in the one-upmanship of the pop music market, the band's various horn sections were augmented by the addition of new personnel, sometimes resulting in a heavy, bloated sound in comparison to the lean perfection of earlier years. More and more, too, Ellington came to accept arrangements from outsiders, with the consequence that some of the band's performances sounded decidedly un-Ellingtonian. If the band had "grown fat" in this sense, the same was true of its boss, whose reputation as a gourmand was legendary. Duke weighed in now at well over 250 pounds, and the size of his ever-expanding wardrobe had perhaps become the most salient feature of the press ballyhoo about him.
The press yawningly reported Ellington's appearances on his annual concert tours, often sneering disparagingly at the "now easily-invaded Carnegie Hall." Now that the war was over, apparently, the symphony world had put its slogans of "racial unity" back in mothballs. Duke couldn't have cared less about the media stories, as he was riding the crest of his greatest popular success. Since the expiration in mid-1946 of his Victor recording contract, he had become a stockholder in the independent Musicraft record label under unusually favorable royalty terms, with stiff guarantees against declining sales. With Dr. Arthur Logan and Decca's Mayo Williams, he also invested at the launching of Sunrise Records. (Unfortunately, neither venture paid off,)
Duke's bookings kept pace with his new ventures. His itinerary for 1946 and 1947 traversed the country twice, and the band played every conceivable type of gig, from posh concerts in tux or tails to theatre dates and junior proms. For the time being, there was also national radio time sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department. Life for Ellington was most assuredly on the upbeat; as far as he was concerned, there was no time like the present to commence a Broadway career, an opportunity that had not presented itself since Jump for Joy went belly-up on the Coast five years before. And from Perry Watkins's point of view, American music offered no better prospect for the sort of production he had in mind.
Near the end of September, it was reported that Duke had finally completed his score for "the new jazz version" of The Beggar's Opera and that he was ready to return to New York from his touring, in order to personally deliver the manuscript to the show's producers. Practice sessions were scheduled to begin around the first of October in preparation for an out-of-town opening, possibly in Boston, around November 11th. The show would be kept on the road for three or four weeks and then brought to New York in mid-December. He told the press that he planned to lose no time in getting together with his co-composer, Billy Strayhorn, to prepare the orchestrations.
It was late summer, 1946, when John Houseman, whom Watkins had known from their days together on the Negro Theatre Project, was brought in as director. Romanian by birth and British-educated, Houseman had been thrust, quite by chance, into American show business since the early 1930s. Since his WPA days, he had been a co-founder, along with Orson Welles, of the Mercury Theatre. In 1941, between spells in Hollywood as a highly successful producer, he was co-producer of the Broadway version of Richard Wright's Native Son. No stranger to controversy, Houseman had already had a considerable impact upon the theatre and, now in his mid-forties, was rightly regarded as a pioneer.
Watkins had first approached him for Beggar's Holiday during the rehearsals for Lute Song in the fall of 1945, and Houseman kept it in mind when he embarked for Hollywood to finish up a studio commitment there. When he returned to New York in the summer of 1946 to discuss the project further, he spoke to Ellington, who he soon learned was "one of the world's great spellbinders." As always, Duke was "hideously busy" and carefully insulated from the rigors and annoyances that frustrate the average person. His retinue consisted of people whose responsibility was to rouse him, choose his wardrobe, feed him, and in general move him through one day to the next. In this way, he explained to Houseman in confidential tones, he managed to preserve his sanity.
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| John Houseman |
With Latouche, whose acquaintance Houseman had made some years before, there was almost from the beginning a clash of temperaments with truly disastrous results. Beyond this bare fact, one has to make up his own mind about who is to blame for the coming failure. In Houseman's eyes, Latouche was indolent, unreliable and dishonest; his promised drafts and revisions of the script never seemed to materialize. What little there was of the finished script, Houseman claims, was due chiefly to the efforts of himself and his assistant, Nicholas Ray.
Ellington, in his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, describes Latouche in very different terms:
It was a great experience writing with a man like him, a man who is so imitated today by other people writing shows. He was truly a great American genius, and he was recognized as such, but he was not an aggressive man and he took it all in his stride like a true artist.10
Coming from Ellington, this was high praise indeed. Moreover, Duke, as if to defend Latouche against Houseman's accusations of irresponsibility, took pains to recognize his indefagitable energy and productivity as the lyricist for over fifty songs in Beggar's Holiday. While none of this settles the question of of authorship of the book, it does suggest a certain rift between Ellington and Houseman, something neither man has indicated. (Internal evidence-- the handwritten manuscripts which accompany the various typescripts of Beggar's Holiday-- leads to the conclusion that Latouche was the major, if not sole, author. The early drafts of Act II, however, confirm Houseman's memory of events: crucial scenes are either missing entirely or summarized in such a way as to be quite useless to actors in rehearsals.) Perhaps some part of the answer to what went wrong with the play resides here, in the distrust that developed between the director, on the one hand, and the lyricist and composer, on the other. In the midst of all this, it was imperative to begin the process of casting and rehearsals at once, particularly since Ellington's schedule, booked well into the next year, would not permit him to remain at hand much longer. First to be cast were the chorus and dance roles (The first versions of the script indicate these parts by the names of the actors, rather than the characters they play). By early October, while the script was still under frequent revision, the leading roles were ready to be cast.
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| Marie Bryant |
Dancer Marie Bryant, with whom Duke had worked in Jump for Joy, was the first cast member hired, as the Cocoa Girl ("TNT"); the part of Macheath went to Alfred Drake, who had achieved fame four seasons earlier for his portrayal of the cowboy Curly in the original production of Oklahoma! Joining him were Libby Holman, in the role of Jenny; Avon Long (of Cotton Club fame and a revival of Porgy and Bess), as Careless Love ("Wanna Be Bad"). An up-and-coming dancer, Marjorie Belle, who portrayed The Girl at odd moments between dance routines, was also among the first cast.
Libby Holman, then 46, stepped into the leading lady role with the expectation that it could crown her long and illustrious career on Broadway. Although she is barely remembered now, Libby once basked in the kind of public glory that made Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead celebrities; she had attained stardom in 1929, with the Schwartz-Dietz Little Show; the following year, in Three's a Crowd, she introduced her most durable standard, "Body and Soul." Libby's private life, a long series of tragedies and emotional scars, had, by the mid-40s, made her nearly as notorious as she was then famous. 11
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| Alfred Drake, Libby Holman, and Zero Mostel |
The remainder of the cast of twenty-eight was to be chosen during rehearsals in October. They included Jet MacDonald as Polly, Mildred Smith, a former high-school teacher from Cleveland, as Lucy; Rollin Smith as Chief Locket; and Dorothy Johnson as Mrs. Peachum. The role of Hamilton Peachum, requiring the sort of broad humor more common to burlesque than to musical theatre, went to Zero Mostel, then appearing nightly at Cafe Society as a stand-up comic. Beggar's Holiday was his very first theatrical role.
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| The Hobo Jungle, Act I |
(TO BE CONTINUED)
In my rotation:
This CD comprises most, if not all, the music the Ellington band recorded for the Musicraft label in 1946. At that time, the band was a rather bloated aggregation of between seventeen and eighteen pieces: five or six trumpets (Francis Williams is incorrectly identified as Cootie Williams in the personnel listings), three trombones, five reeds, and four rhythm players. Likewise, the recordings themselves were sometimes extended to both sides of a ten-inch, 78-rpm record, with two-part titles like the title tune (extracted from Duke's current concert piece, The Deep South Suite), "The Beautiful Indians, and Billy Strayhorn's Overture to a Jam Session.
Throughout the program, but most particularly on "Happy-Go-Lucky Local," the bassist Oscar Pettiford puts forward an exceptional performance, continuing the modern trend first demonstrated in the orchestra by Jimmy Blanton. Strayhorn contributes a second composition, the puckish "Flippant Flurry," featuring clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton in another fine performance. Three vocalists appear, including soprano Kay Davis's lovely, wordless singing on The Beautiful Indians, Part 2: "Minnehaha," Al Hibbler on "It Shouldn't Happen to a Dream," and the redoubtable Ray Nance on "Tulip or Turnip."
This recording, in its original LP form, is a very old friend of mine. It features Monk's regular quartet, consisting of saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist Larry Gales and drummer Ben Riley. The CD reissue features full versions of tunes (most notably "Japanese Folk Tune") that were abridged in the original release, plus the bonus tracks "I Didn't Know About You" (alternate take) and the first recorded performance of Monk's "Green Chimneys." The former tune, in its original issue (take 4), was my first introduction to the Ellington classic, and has long been my favorite track on the album.
I bought this CD on the recommendation of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, and I'm not disappointed. The same band plays on both releases, and they are a smoking group with fine arrangements. Winners was recorded at Basin Street West, in San Francisco, as was half of Hoot, which consists of outtakes from the same stand. Much like Basie's "new testament" groups, this is an arrangers' band, with fine contributions from Sal Nistico, Nat Pierce, Bill Chase, and other, less familiar names, like Don Rader and Duke Goykovich.
The fine rhythm section (pianist Nat Pierce, bassist Anthony Leonardi, and drummer Ronnie Zito) inspires the rest of the band to blow their butts off. Woody's unanticipated vocal on Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder" manages somehow to import the Brazilian tune "O Pato" ("The Duck").
In my rotation:
- Duke Ellington, Beggar's Holiday (my own compilation)
Appropriately for this post, I brought out this omnibus, assembled thirty-odd years ago to hear nearly every tune from the show I could get my hands on. I started with the 1946 cast recordings (reissued by Blue Pear Records, unfortunately after the article had been published) on which Libby Holman had already been replaced by Bernice Parks in the role of Jenny Diver. The other cast members participating were Alfred Drake, Avon Long, Jet MacDonald, Dorothy Johnson, Marie Bryant, and Mildred Smith, in the roles of, respectively, Macheath, Careless Love, Polly Peachum, Mrs. Peachum, the Cocoa Girl, and Lucy Lockit. No Zero Mostel, sad to say. A lucky find, coming along when it did.
Following this is Libby Holman's latter-day (1965) recording of "In Between," on the album Something to Remember Her By, and Lena Horne's version of "Tomorrow Mountain" from her Stormy Weather album on RCA in 1956. Dick Buckley's radio show provided an excerpt from a Down Beat awards ceremony at the Chicago Civic Opera House that included a medley of "Tomorrow Mountain" (sans vocal), "When I Walk With You," and "Brown Penny," the latter tunes featuring the voice of Kay Davis. Then come the only five studio recordings plus alternate takes, all from 1947 on Columbia, that the Ellington band made of tunes from the show, including Billy Strayhorn's magnificent arrangements of "Brown Penny" and "Change My Ways." The first disc concludes with a 1959 recording of "Brown Penny" by the Ellington band and a sexy rendition of "Take Love Easy" by Alice Babs on her 1963 album with Ellington, Serenade to Sweden.
The second disc is a little more problematic, beginning with my own piano renditions (some rather painful to hear) of the sheet music-- for five tunes otherwise not recorded-- provided on microfilm by the New York Public Library. The bulk of the tracks remaining come from Chicago's Pegasus Players in rehearsal for a 1994 revival of the show. (While attending, I sat next to Dale Wasserman, one of the original production's producers and a thoroughly unpleasant man.) The disc ends with four tracks by the Dutch Jazz Orchestra on their series of Billy Strayhorn tunes.
- Lawrence Welk & Johnny Hodges (Dot, 196?)
I received this from ejc, on a needle-drop cassette (It can be observed that the title changed when the record was reissued on CD.) There are no accordions featured here, thank God; the large string ensemble features orchestrations by many distinguished arrangers, including Benny Carter, Russ Garcia, and Marty Paitch.
Hodges plays impeccably throughout, but at times the orchestra induces boredom. Some of the featured tunes are oddities, such as "Fantastic, That's You," "Haunting Melody," "When My Baby Smiles at Me," and "Canadian Sunset, " but it's reassuring to hear Hodges play on the Ellington compositions "I'm Beginning to See the Light" (on which he played the original 1944 alto solo), "Sophisticated Lady" and "In a Sentimental Mood" (where he steps into the role originally occupied by his section-mate, Otto Hardwicke).
- Duke Ellington, Happy-Go-Lucky Local (Musicraft, 1946)
This CD comprises most, if not all, the music the Ellington band recorded for the Musicraft label in 1946. At that time, the band was a rather bloated aggregation of between seventeen and eighteen pieces: five or six trumpets (Francis Williams is incorrectly identified as Cootie Williams in the personnel listings), three trombones, five reeds, and four rhythm players. Likewise, the recordings themselves were sometimes extended to both sides of a ten-inch, 78-rpm record, with two-part titles like the title tune (extracted from Duke's current concert piece, The Deep South Suite), "The Beautiful Indians, and Billy Strayhorn's Overture to a Jam Session.
Throughout the program, but most particularly on "Happy-Go-Lucky Local," the bassist Oscar Pettiford puts forward an exceptional performance, continuing the modern trend first demonstrated in the orchestra by Jimmy Blanton. Strayhorn contributes a second composition, the puckish "Flippant Flurry," featuring clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton in another fine performance. Three vocalists appear, including soprano Kay Davis's lovely, wordless singing on The Beautiful Indians, Part 2: "Minnehaha," Al Hibbler on "It Shouldn't Happen to a Dream," and the redoubtable Ray Nance on "Tulip or Turnip."
- Thelonious Monk, Straight, No Chaser (Columbia, 1966-1967)
This recording, in its original LP form, is a very old friend of mine. It features Monk's regular quartet, consisting of saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist Larry Gales and drummer Ben Riley. The CD reissue features full versions of tunes (most notably "Japanese Folk Tune") that were abridged in the original release, plus the bonus tracks "I Didn't Know About You" (alternate take) and the first recorded performance of Monk's "Green Chimneys." The former tune, in its original issue (take 4), was my first introduction to the Ellington classic, and has long been my favorite track on the album.
- Woody Shaw, Blackstone Legacy (Contemporary/ OJC, 1970)
This recording was not the first one by Shaw under his own name, but it was the first to be issued. Here the trumpeter leads a sextet including saxophonists Gary Bartz and Bennie Maupin, pianist George Cables, drummer Lenny White, and a team of bassists, Clint Houston and the veteran Ron Carter.
The five-year interval between his first effort, Cassandranite, and this album is telling; Blackstone Legacy represents a step forward from the hardtop Shaw had been playing, into another territory entirely. Here his band avails itself with the sort of shifting time-signatures I associate with the music of Charles Mingus.
More to the point, perhaps, is this record's huge debt to the recently-issued Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, which propelled the fusion trend of the '70s for most jazz artists of the time. Unlike the others, however, Shaw mostly eschewed the trendy electronic instrumentation of the time to explore the sort of extended composition put forward by John Coltrane in the '60s, including his proclivity for spiritual expression. This is the sort of music Shaw would create for the rest of his career.
Shaw's compositions here include the title tune, "Lost and Found," "Boo-Ann's Grand" (reflecting the changing moods of his wife, much in the fashion of Coltrane's "Naima"), and the tribute to one of his first mentors, "A Deed for Dolphy." Two charts by Cables, "Think on Me" and ""New World," complete the set.
This CD reissue of what originally had been a two-LP set includes a generous 79 minutes of music, although, in order to accommodate all of the tunes, two of them had to be trimmed to a slightly shorter length.
The five-year interval between his first effort, Cassandranite, and this album is telling; Blackstone Legacy represents a step forward from the hardtop Shaw had been playing, into another territory entirely. Here his band avails itself with the sort of shifting time-signatures I associate with the music of Charles Mingus.
More to the point, perhaps, is this record's huge debt to the recently-issued Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, which propelled the fusion trend of the '70s for most jazz artists of the time. Unlike the others, however, Shaw mostly eschewed the trendy electronic instrumentation of the time to explore the sort of extended composition put forward by John Coltrane in the '60s, including his proclivity for spiritual expression. This is the sort of music Shaw would create for the rest of his career.
Shaw's compositions here include the title tune, "Lost and Found," "Boo-Ann's Grand" (reflecting the changing moods of his wife, much in the fashion of Coltrane's "Naima"), and the tribute to one of his first mentors, "A Deed for Dolphy." Two charts by Cables, "Think on Me" and ""New World," complete the set.
This CD reissue of what originally had been a two-LP set includes a generous 79 minutes of music, although, in order to accommodate all of the tunes, two of them had to be trimmed to a slightly shorter length.
- Harry Nilsson, KNNILLSSONN (RCA, 1977)
One of Nilsson's late '70s releases, this recording lacks the broad, beautiful upper range of his vocals; indeed, at times it settles for a delivery that is half-sung and half-spoken. That said, there is no diminution of his compositional ability or his emotional effectiveness. The writing and instrumental accompaniment are strong throughout.
Some of these songs continue the vaudeville reminiscences employed from the beginnings of Harry's career, but the gorgeous "All I Think About Is You," the first track, completely captures the heart with his plaintive low-register singing. Likewise does "Perfect Day" and "Who Done It," a country reel enhanced by synthetic strings.
Some of these songs continue the vaudeville reminiscences employed from the beginnings of Harry's career, but the gorgeous "All I Think About Is You," the first track, completely captures the heart with his plaintive low-register singing. Likewise does "Perfect Day" and "Who Done It," a country reel enhanced by synthetic strings.
- Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige (cassette compiled by Sjef Hoefsmidt)
This cassette was Sjef's gift to the members of the Duke Ellington Music Society, which thrived for many years under his leadership.
The enclosed notes and track listing make further comment unecessary, except to point out that the sound quality of the '60s and '70s recordings is far superior to the Carnegie Hall recording of 1943, as one would expect. "New" material from the 1980s series of Danish Radio broadcasts is used liberally. The excerpts included on the 1944 Victor double-78 rpm issue are fine, but Ben Webster, by the time it was made, was unfortunately no longer in the band, nor was singer Betty Roché. As controversial as the suite was at its first performance-- panned by most classical music critics and more than a few jazz writers-- it was groundbreaking at the time, both symbolically and musically, and it remains an Ellington composition of the first order.
- Thelonious Monk, Underground (1967)
with Charlie Rouse, ts; Larry Gales, b; Ben Riley, d.
Despite the garish sleeve photo, the music here is fine. Original LP tracks include "Thelonious," "Ugly Beauty," "Raise Four," "Boo Boo's Birthday," "Easy Street," "Green Chimneys" (a robust version of a tune previously recorded and included on the CD reissue of Straight, No Chaser see above), and "In Walked Bud."
Despite the garish sleeve photo, the music here is fine. Original LP tracks include "Thelonious," "Ugly Beauty," "Raise Four," "Boo Boo's Birthday," "Easy Street," "Green Chimneys" (a robust version of a tune previously recorded and included on the CD reissue of Straight, No Chaser see above), and "In Walked Bud."
- Woody Herman, Jazz Hoot (Columbia, 1965-1967)/ Woody's Winners (Columbia, 1965); both on Collectables CD
The fine rhythm section (pianist Nat Pierce, bassist Anthony Leonardi, and drummer Ronnie Zito) inspires the rest of the band to blow their butts off. Woody's unanticipated vocal on Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder" manages somehow to import the Brazilian tune "O Pato" ("The Duck").
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