Toodle-oo," and my term paper on jazz bassists inevitably led me to Jimmy Blanton; hence, my first Ellington album was Things Ain't What They Used to Be, a compilation of Ellington small groups led by Johnny Hodges and Rex Stewart in 1940 and 1941.
DE first performed in Sweden, 1939. The band's April 29, DE's 40th-birthday Stockholm appearance yielded "Serenade to Sweden," and "In a Little Red Cottage by the Sea," translation of a Swedish folk song, sung by Ivie Anderson on the aircheck recording.
Over the years following, she continued to accompany Ellington on tours, including performances of his Sacred Concerts in the late 1960s. "My wildest dream was to work with Duke Ellington." To rehearse his Second Sacred Concert in 1967, Duke sent her an airline ticket and booked a hotel room in New York. She worried that they had only nine days to rehearse, but Ellington was still touring out of town. He finally met with Babs five days later to play his new music for her. With no strain at all, she immediately started to sing and stopped worrying about the coming performance.
A year after Elis's death, her brother Rogerio extracted all the tracks in this album; the vocals were then overdubbed on a prerecorded backing track and given a lot of echo, with only one exception, All of the selections are excellent but from this perspective the tracks sound dated '80s-style, full of synths and drum machines and tinny effects. But Elis, even posthumously, didn't seem to care who was in accompaniment.
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| David Baker |
My early jazz education was backwards, in the sense that my first jazz heroes were contemporary masters of "free jazz": Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John Coltrane, and Archie Shepp, among others.
I was fortunate, in 1972-- my senior year at Indiana University-- to attend a performance on campus of Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. I didn't really know what I was hearing: I spent the first half of the show anxiously checking my wristwatch and left during intermission to make a political speech. This was, after all, the impending revolution
Graduate studies led me in 1979 to join Chicago's Duke Ellington Society (dubbed the Ray Nance chapter). Another component in my Ellington education was"Dick Buckley's Archives of Jazz," on WBEZ radio nightly. At some point around this time, Buckley also devoted four to Ellington recordings alone for four hours each Sunday afternoon.
On one particular show, Buckley played a taped interview with Benny Aasland in New York, from what was to become the first of many international gatherings of the Duke Ellington Study Group.
Dick Buckley doing what he did best
In 1979 or 1980 I interviewed drummer Louis Bellson at his gig at Rick's Cafe Americain, at the Lake Shore Holiday Inn. Unfortunately, I didn't tape the interview, but I do remember his utter enthusiasm when he recalled his time with Duke. When I asked how he fared in the segregated South while touring with the band, he replied sincerely, but ludicrously, that he was able to pass as an albino.
A few months later, in the Chicago Jazz Festival in the late summer, of 1981, Bellson returned to perfom in a quartet with his fellow Ellingtonian, Clark Terry. To WBEZ radio host Neil Tesser, neither had a bad word to say about Ellington.
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By that time I was attending Northeastern Illinois University's Center for Inner City Studies in Chicago to earn a Masters in Education degree. Within two years, I wrote a 250-page tome, saddled with the cumbersome title, THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY AS EXPLOITER OF MUSICAL TALENT, AS REFLECTED IN THE CAREER OF DUKE ELLINGTON.
Why Ellington? My first serious interest in jazz had been Bud Powell, as I was earlier deep into bop. The explanation was given in the thesis itself: "By and large,...it must be said that the overwhelming preponderance of [jazz] writing has been little more than a history of Black failure in the American music business.... What we propose to do here is examine America's cultural apparatus by focusing on the career of a Black 'success': Duke Ellington." My approach was close to that of Harvey Cohen's Duke Ellington's America (2010) : to give as much attention to the social and political background as I did to Ellington himself. (Although Duke was to declare countless times, "I live in the realm of art. I have no monetary interests," I have never believed that. Unfortunately, every human being has monetary interests.)
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| from the copy of Ulanov's book I bought at Toad Hall |
In the 1970s, there were few books about Ellington. I began with Barry Ulanov's 1946 biography of Duke, Mercer Ellington's memoir, Duke Ellington in Person , and a few years later Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz to give myself a foundation, especially with the discography Ulanov appends to his biography. There was also a book from the UK called Jazz on Record, which contained extensive commentary on Ellington and reference to over a hundred Ellington recordings on vinyl LPs. After I'd achieved a basic understanding of my subject, I knuckled down to the real work, finding primary sources.: news clippings, advertisements in library stacks and microfilm reels. There was no inkling of even a home computer in the 1970s.
Into the 1980s my searches took me far and wide. I remember several visits to Rockford, a short drive from Chicago, to buy Ellington records, and I found plenty, almost all 78-rpm. I bought a collection of four discs on the Columbia label called Ellington Special and a splendid double-twelve inch masterpiece, the original issue of Black, Brown and Beige on RCA-Victor. I paid a small fee to have perhaps a dozen shellack discs, recording's I never heard, copied to cassettes on a big variety of labels to open up new vistas of Duke to me.
Mercer Ellington became, in 1979, one of my staunchest allies. Research led me to an interview with him between sets at a performance at the Park West, on the North Side of Chicago.
VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT, 7/22/79
I want to ask you about your father's relationship with Irving Mills. The credit on the compositions that Mills took: Were they always given rightfully to Mills?
Well, it was the practice of publishers in those days. If they were somewhere, as Duke Ellington said, and you wanted to get somewhere, you had to make a deal with somebody to get your first tunes out. Today it hasn't changed too much. You get paid for yesterday's ball game. You write your song last year, and then they recognize you as a great composer this year, and that's when you get an advance on what you want to do.
I know your father never said anything publicly against Mills. Did you ever hear him say anything in private?
My feeling is that his relationship with Sidney [Mills, Irving's son] and to Irving was that it was a great place to get an education. Actually, he learned two things-- well, many things, I guess-- while he was growing up in music. And one of them was the business end he learned from Irving, and also many rules of being a showman, and so forth.
I know that many times in the Black press he was criticized for his relationship with Mills. Did that bother him at all?
Well, he was criticized for other things than that in the Black Press. In many cases, whatever was said was generally taken out of context. At one point, he made a statement that said, "We ain't ready," and they said that Duke Ellington thought that Negroes-- or Black,s as the new expression is-- just weren't intelligent enough to get freedom. What he meant was that they weren't financially strong enough to take their legal suits up to the Supreme Court. Never took but that part of the one question, made a whole big deal out of it, and it took them maybe a year and a half to get over the propaganda. I'm not saying this to deride the Black press, or any other press. But, I mean, you're going to get hustlers, regardless of whether it's the white press or the Black press. Somebody that has no name, and he tricks on a giant to get himself into the limelight. And I think this is what happened in most of these instances. Through the years, some fifty years of being on the road, I don't think you can grab anybody who's really worth his salt in the industry to come up and really say something that's derogatory about Ellington or his thoughts.
What were his reasons, as far as you know, for leaving Mills and going with William Morris in 1939?
He grew up! I mean he decided... You have it today. You get a group like the Beatles, or whoever; they get to a point where they can sell millions of records. They buy their own contracts back, and they go on their own. And that's precisely just about what happened in those days.You see, it wasn't always a one hundred per cent deal. Pop owned fifty per cent of Mills Music, and Mills owned fifty per cent of Duke Ellington's band. At a time when both of them were apparently equal, they traded. That's pretty much that the relation grew. And at the time when he was passing away, they had a conversation with each other for about forty-five minutes. So if you think that there'd be a time when he'd have negative thoughts about Irving, it would have been at the end of his life, particularly since he knew it was.
I know that on the publication of his autobiography, it's said by one of your father's biographers, that Mills was calling up your father's friends, anxious about what your father would say about him.
Well, you have to bear in mind that Mills, Irving, was as much of a genius in his field as Ellington was in music. When that band traveled in those days, he'd get to a place; the college band would be there to greet the train. They'd march him around to the hotel. That alone gave him a new importance, of being in a spot where people would say, "I've got to go to the dance tonight, or whatever. Irving was responsible for his being in the Cotton Club, which was the break place of one of the new babies, radio. And, as a result, at a time when everybody else was practically unknown-- and there were great orchestras like Fletcher Henderson, and the rest of them-- he was being broadcast coast to coast and gaining tremendous recognition from it.
I get the impression that your father was very much concerned with his public image. Can you say anything about the role of Ned Williams and Joe Morgen in promoting him and putting this image forward?
My father had great respect for people who might be classified as "carney men." You know, a person who could take something and then ballyhoo it and make it so very important. And for this reason, this is one of the things that made him have such respect for Irving, as well, and also for anyone else who proclaimed to the public that this was a great man coming before it. With each of these people, he admired the fact that they were almost as much ham as he was!
Was Cress Courtney also important in that respect?
Absolutely. I'll tell you one of the things he really appreciated in Mills, Cress Courtney, and also William Morris. In those days, they had a tendency to categorize show-business. I mean, for instance, you've got people who make the great breakthroughs, you've got Black millionaires like James Brown and so forth. But in those days, you just didn't get that price, and Irving was one of the first to demand that he get the same consideration as the big white acts. The same thing with Cress Courtney. Cress Courtney came on the scene and doubled and tripled the money that he made in one-nighters. As time went on,, it put him on a level in show business he wouldn't normally have gotten to.
I want to take you back to the year 1943, which was the year of his first Carnegie Hall Concert.
Presentation of Black, Brown and Beige?
Right. It was a benefit for the Russian War Relief. To your recollection, can you remember any of the names of those people who were on that Committee? I've had trouble finding out exactly who was the Russian War Relief.
I'm glad you told me who the people were who sponsored it!
Okay, back a little further to Jump for Joy in 1941. Did your father have any association with any kind of radicalism in Hollywood in those days?
Well, there was plenty of it there, particularly Communism. As a result of Jump for Joy, they considered the show-- not necessarily Duke Ellington, but the show-- a pretty radical experince, because they had numbers in there like "I Need a Passport from Georgia," and "Jump for Joy" itself derided the South for many things that happened there. Like they were talking about Uncle Tom's Cabin and how things have changed, and they'd made it a drive-in. There were many outspoken comments about the disadvantage of being in the South for Blacks. During the run of the show, and I was there, we had something like five or six bomb threats fromn people who threatened to do something or harm people in the show. When it closed, it closed to a standing-room. only house.
Yet you say in your book that your father was very much anticommunist. Did he have any kind of mixed feelings about Paul Robeson, for example?
No. You know why he was anticommunist? Because he was so religious, and anything that downed religion had to be wrong. And I have no way to feel that that was not a correct way of thinking. Aside fro that, he liked the idea of one day becoming rich, he hoped. He liked the idea-- that as a young man, he went in the back door of the White House to visit his father; eventually, he was invited in the front door. So he liked the idea of being someplace where this was possible, where he could have the opportunities to achieve it. I think particularly, after our tour in Russia-- though he never made a comment about it-- he felt that the day we arrived in Copenhagen, it was the greatest was a breath of fresh air that he'd had in a long time.
I know that on his tours, and at other times in his life, he was always put in the position of having to defend the United States' policy toward Black people. Did he ever fell the government was using him, in Dakar or other places on his tours would talk to him about it?
I figure-- I feel the same way. When we went to Black countries, he was being used as a diplomat, to cement social relations. When we were sent to Iron Curtain countries, we were sent there to counteract the propaganda that the Black man in the United States was downtrodden. And it was an after-example of how a person could be Black and could still become successful, and also to show that there was more than one type of person, and that not everybody who's a Black who got up there on a soapbox and made speeches on adamancy and militancy; but there was somebody who could be genteel and still persuasive.
But that patriotism of his, you feel, was really heartfelt, was a hundred per cent?
Yes. But he was an objective person. I mean that he knew that some time or other, when he was on a Pullman in the South, someone was liable to call him "George" or something like that, and he'd get very angry about it. But by the same token, he also could be heard in conversation to admire the South for its frankness, because in the North there was an equal feeling which was always underlined, and you never knew if you were or weren't in the presence of it. So it was a thing that was with us then, and in a sense it's with us now.
Did he feel kind of caught by surprise by what was happening in the'60s in this country, with the freedom-rides and the sit-ins? Did he feel out of his element?
No, it isn't that. He became very careful, because I think the most trouble he ever got into racially came as a result of the discussion he had with his own people, the very incident I was telling you about: he made the statement that Blacks weren't ready. So he felt that if he made4 normal, general statements-- there's no words. If you look at articles and interviews that he had, I'd say, easily some thirty years before he passed away, you'll find that it's very difficult to take things out of context and turn them into a negative capacity. I think this is what he had in mind more than anything else, when he went through interviews, unless he felt he was being interviews by a person who had great intelligence and great respect for him.
Was that another factor in his break with Mills, perhaps? I've noted in some of my reading that a friend of his, Edmund Anderson, was pressuring him to go onto the concert stage, and that Mills was holding him back, and was not tookeen on his making a "social significance thrust," in your father's own words.
Well, Edmund Anderson, I think, has a tendency to pour luster on himself by stating that he was so close to Ellington in certain relationships, which he wasn't. I mean, he was associated with him, and Ellington had a friendly attitude toward him. As far as knowing about him inside and personally, he knew nothing. This goes for many people who have written books about Ellington. It went for a book that was written several years back, one of the first biographies that was made. It was Barry Ulanovwho wrote the book. And Barry professed the knowledge of Ellington from the inside, and put things in the book that he expressly did not want to be there, and also some things that were not true. One f the guys who made a very derogatory comment about my book, and stated that he knew Duke Ellington better than I do: the only one somebody could have done that was to have slept with him, and he was not one of his women!
In 1965, of course, the Pulitzer Prize Committee rejected you father's nomination for an award in music. I realize, by his public statements, he kind of tossed it off. Did he feel that rejection very deeply? Was it a very important award to him?
No, I don't think so. Of course he would love to have been presented the Pulitzer Prize. But it didn't enrage him nearly as much as the early years when Howard University turned down an honorary degree to him.
I note they didn't give him a degree until 1971, well after all the white universities.
Right. And in those days, it had been successive at each year that he deserved it, and all those years they turned it down.
Among all those hundreds of awards that he got, which ones would you say he considered the most important?
The Legion of Honor from France. The Spingarn medal. And also the medal that he got from the White House.
You mention in your book that there was a kind of paranoia about the man. You recall, I think it was the term you used, communists or homosexuals, or or whoever was trying to get in the way of his career. Was this something that grew more pronounced late in his life, or do you feel he felt from even his early career that there were conspiracies?
I think it became more pronounced in his life, as it probably is developing in me at this point! I know what it is, and I think we all go through it, whoever's in entertainment. Sometimes maybe it's because you want to rationalize to yourself why you're not making as much progress as you think you should. Or because there are certain breakthroughs that you don't achieve, because you're too knowledgeable. You don't give up what you'd give up as a novice, and as a result, you don't get that much push behind you by certain people who have better interest. We fought for years to own the name of Duke Ellington, Incorporated. To own it completely, and of course we do. The idea is, if I went out and made a deal with somebody for fifty per cent that I'd be getting then would be much more than I'm making now! But somehow there's a pride or a tradition that you want to hold to. It's like a man who starts a department store: he doesn't want his children after him to take the department store and sell it out and sell him down the river. It took him years to build it, and why give it away? I think it's this knowledge. It's like, the worst person to put in the army is the guy who's been there for twenty years and goes out and comes back because he knows too mucdh about how to get around and catch up with who's doing wrong, and so forth. So as a result, many times you have a person who is, like they say, too smart for himself, because he doesn't take chances or he wants absolute guarantees before he moves a foot; and as a result, if you can't take a chance on yourself, a lot of people don't feel like they should take a chance on you, either.
But I realize that the great part of entertainment now is investment. I mean, a new star is created because three or four big people get together and they say, "Okay, let's put up $200,000 apieceto promote this name, because there's a great talent." If you're coming along, and you don't have that kind of promotion, you're working at a disadvantage. so, basically, this is not what I refer to when I say that it's a matter of conspiracy. But I'll always remember, in some religious material somewhere along the line, it says you have to watch out for the fallen enemies of your father who got back up, and these are the people I face from day to day.
In your capacity as band manager while your father was still alive, you seemed to really emphasize the discord within the orchestra. Do you feel that that was exaggerated, or was there really quite a falling out?
Just like I mentioned, Cootie Williams and Cat Anderson: we'd call them bookends, because they kept their backs toward each other during performances and never spoke a word to each other when they came off. They just hated each other's guts, and there were several people in the band who really did not like Ellington himself. They hated each other, but they had to admire the talent that existed in the person who sat next to them. The reason I don't go further on that subject about the dislikes and likes of who was involved, is because many of those people are alive. Cat and Cootie, I mean, I'm close to, so I can talk about them if I want to. It's like family. But some of the other guys, they're around, and you just don't do it.
But somewhere along the linein the history of the band, it just ceased to be a cooperative venture, where everybody was in it together?
It's a troupe of ballerinas. Each one is born to be her own star. And in this thing, they feel it's temporary in order to coexist. But each one has in mind becoming his own individual talent. And I think, as the years went by, instead of the camaraderie developing because they stayed with Ellington so lon, they had passed by their oown opportunities, and they blamede it on him, and detested him for keeping them there.
Yet when they left the band, they rarely found themselves admired as they were when they were in the band.
Yes. It was a platform he'd prepared for them.
One final question I want to ask you, regarding publishers from the '40s onward. Tempo music in 1940, is that right?
Yes, Actually, Duke Ellington set the company and gave it to her [Ruth Ellington, his sister] to run, because the company would never have gotten to first base, if it didn't have the band as a vehicle to come up with the hits. And almost immediately, one year, Tempo broke through with three big hits in a row: "Perdido,' "Take the 'A' Train," and "Flamingo."
At the same time, he was being published by Robbins, right?
No, the Robbins contract had ceased by that point.
I see. So it was Tempo allt thorugh the '40s and 50s?
Yes, and once in a while, he'd make a separate deal with someone, like something special he might record, and do a song and share the rights with. Somebody like [Sid] Kuller. or maybe Johnny Mercer, or whatever, and once in a while you'd see that. But there had to be something very special about it.
But basically, ever since 1940, it's been Tempo, unless he went outside with a collaborater?
Yes. He felt he didn't get any promotion unless he did it himself, so why give to somebody else what yourself?
I felt it had been a good interview (it later became an appendix to my thesis), but I had a stroke of good luck that night: A man who had overheard the conversation approached me and offer to sell his Ellington record collection at a very tempting price. I wound up buying only half of it, and I chose to take the oldies from before the Second World War. One of my purchases was a three-record Columbia box set called The Ellington Era. It was a compilation of the work Ellington had recorded for the label, and it became the cornerstone of my record collection. It also contained a beautiful booklet with fine essays by Stanley Dance and Leonard Feather.
Later the same year, Mercer returned to Chicago for the orchestra's performance at the Auditorium Theater downtown. We conversed casually until the band came onstage, during which time he introduced me to the great Cootie Williams, who went out with me for coffee in the nearby Palmer House hotel on Wabash Avenue.
After the Ellington band began to play I wandered backstage to meet the main attraction of the evening, the divine Sarah Vaughan. When I knocked on the door, I was surprised to discover her without her show clothes, including her wig. I timidly asked for and received her autograph on a piece of paper I had with me.
What I really wanted was to ask her to run away with me forever.
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| Cootie Williams |
Harvey G. Cohen
Almost immediately after writing my thesis, I wanted to expand it into a larger, more up-to-date book, so I mailed copies out to prospective publishers. For a while I received nothing but rejection slips, until I caught the interest of Oxford University Press editor Sheldon Meyer. (I was naive; as it turned out, Oxford sat on my manuscript for months, in order to come out later with a lackluster book by James Lincoln Collier, in order to avoid potential competition with my own work.)
.
The Chicago chapter of the Duke Ellington Society (dubbed the "Ray Nance chapter by our unofficial leader, Don Miller). As far as my listening was concerned, Don was indispensable; he had a sizeable collection of Ellington records and was happy to make cassette copies for me.
"All for the love of Duke"
"I have only two heroes: Duke Ellington and Thomas Jefferson."
lived alone in the Hyde Park area.
1. getting acquainted; her 12-year old daughter.
2. "If you want to know Ellington, listen to the music; if you want to know Strayhorn, listen to the words... longing and loss
3. visiting her in hospital (appendectomy?)
4. rehearsing "Lush Life" with her.
5. invited her to speak to my Honors class.
6. She has elected to devote the rest of her life to religion, but her name still turns up on the Duke-LYM email list with pertinent comments and announcements (she still keeps a hand in the Ellington game).
"Salute to Strayhorn": Interview with Bill Charlap and Alyce Claerbaut
CA. 1979, I SPOKE WITH LOUIS BELLSON AT RICK'S CAFE AMERICAINE AT THE LAKE SHORE HOLIDAY INN. GEORGE DUVIVIER WAS IN HIS TRIOL. BELLSON'S STORY ABOUT PASSING FOR "ALBINO" IN THE DEEP SOUTH.
1981 CHICAGO JAZZ FESTIVAL IN GRANT PARK: Bellson & Clark Terry were interviewed after their performance (by Neil Tesser?)
Summer 1982 in Southern California:
Lawrence Brown, Century City, L.A, 7/31/82
Lawrence Brown first joined the Ellington band in 1932, when Irving Mills saw him playing with Hite Morgan's band at Sebastian's Cotton Club in LA. Nineteen year s later he resigned from Ellington's band, along with Johnny Hodges and Al Sears, in March 1951, not for monetary matters, he told Stanley Dance, but because he and the other musicians were becoming bored with playing the same solos night after night in a big band; Johnny Hodges small band was therefore an exercise of his independence and desire to try something new.
Lawrence Brown played with played with Hodges's until he reived a rare and lucrative opportunity small group in Broadway pit orchestras and radio studio programs. But by 1960 musicians could not make a living while their prerecorded performances were usually used inn instead. until retiring in 1970. In all, he played trombone in the Duke Ellington Orchestra for a total of about 30 years.
He was the son of a minister. Although born in Kansas, he moved frequently for his father was obliged to take the ministry in different places every few years. By the time he met Ellington, Lawrence Brown lived in Pasadena CA.
A primary source for anyone interested in Ellington is Lawrence Brown's wide-ranging and candid interview with Stanley Dance in The World of Duke Ellington (Da Capo, 1970). At the conclusion to their interview, Stanley Dance pronounced Lawrence Brown "the epitome of the professional musician who maintains his standards despite the dictates of fashion and commerce. Here, however, Brown told me some things that Dance either never heard or chose to ignore.
*
Brown joined the Ellington band in the spring of 1932, quit Ellington to work with Johnny Hodges's small group in 1951, and finally played accompanying Broadway shows until he rejoined Ellington in 1960. He retired in 1970 and died in 1988, aged 82. In all, he had played trombone in Duke Ellington's Orchestra for twenty-nine years.
Brown was my first interview in Los Angeles. I met him backstage at Century City, with the revue Sophisticated Ladies. Mercer Ellington had hired him to work during the show's Los Angeles run but did not come here himself; his sole concern was Duke Ellington's music.
Brown was a few days away from his seventy-fiftth birthday, but still looked young. People entering and exiting throughout performance, heard on intercom I found him backstage, 2 floors down from entranc Brown's professional experience prior to joining DE in 1932: By the time he turned professional, Brown had already years of experience, first in movie work (earned $10 an hour and paid no income tax as long he was on the sets).
Brown's first big band job had come with Les Hite's band, which included Louis Armstrong, at Sebastian's Cotton Club in Los Angeles. The job was convenient, as Brown's home was in Pasadena. Unfortunately, he resigned the Cotton Club job because the manager, gangster Johnny Collins, insisted he show up for a photoshoot on Easter Sunday.
Interview, Track 1:
Helen Ennico was retiring from her NY DES retiring from her editorial post and LB fears it will mark a decline in their publication (to which I also had access). I had just had a long phone call with her,
LB is still in touch with many fans including Marion Stevenson, who had recently moved from Chicago, where she had been a member of our Ray Nance Chapter) to LA.
"When I joined the [Ellington] band in California, I was doing very well. If we didn't work in the movies, something was wrong."
Brown told the story of how he quit Louis Armstrong's band in 1931 at Sebastian's Cotton Club in Culver City California,, because they demanded he appear at a photo shoot on Easter Sunday. The Brown family home was in nearby Pasadena, which a certainly great factor in his being hired by the great (and well-paying) Duke Ellington's band in 1932, ironically the week after previous year's Easter.
Ulanov's book came closest, in his opinion, to telling the truth about Ellington, revealing some of his flaws: "He just hinted" about some of Ellington's negative traits. "There's nobody that knows [Ellington]."
"I did not like Duke Ellington's band... I didn't just blow the horn. I used to study people and what was going on....The best thing about my years [in Ellington's band] was the experience of travel and meeting people all over the world. The rest was a very deep disappointment. They gave him a night at [Sebastian's] Cotton Club, with all the lights and satin curtains. I didn't see what was so great in all that. Fletcher Henderson, to me, had the best-playing band. Ellington's songs sounded weird, and I didn't like them."
The gangster Johnny Collins ran the syndicate that managed Louis Armstrong. Mills chose Brown after hearing a rendition of his specialty, "Trees."playing brown's specialty number,"Trees."
Brown said that Juan Tizol, "the rock of the trombone section," was the sole band member to copywright his own compositions before giving them to the band. When "Caravan" and "Perdido" became huge hits, Ellington received no publishing royalties. "There's a system... you write a tune, it must first go to a publisher." With Ellington, you might get five percent cut off [the rest going to purported co-authors.] "And most of the time, these four or five people belonged to one mastermind... He owns the other four writers working for him. In this case. the mastermind was Irving Mills, from beginning to end."
Irving Mills ran the band. When he recommended Brown to Ellington, he was hired, sight unseen. He joined the Wednesday after Easter, 1932, and by the following weekend the band had travelled to New York. "I was single. I did't have anything to hold me." However, on the trip to New York Brown came down with a cold and was thoroughly miserable.
"When we got to New York, I found out that I was the thirteenth man.Then it came out I couldn't play." He had to wait for the arrival of one other man, Otto Hardwicke, who was still in Europe during his few years away from Ellington's band. "So I didn't work from the time I left Los Angeles until the band played the Pearle(?) Theater in Philadelphia six or seven weeks later. "In the meantime, he was paid fifty dollars a week. "They told me I was crazy. I said, 'Look, I don't like Ellington's music and I don't know anything about it." Brown said he'd joined Ellington's band mainly for the opportunity to travel the country.
$70 a week to cover expenses after joining Ellington. Brown put his Cadillac up on blocks in Pasadena. "Then I find out I'm not getting paid until I work a week, seven days. That was the first shot. So I paid my room rent, I paid everything. That's how Mills maneuvered; Ellington had nothing to do with it." After weeks of rehearsal the band finally got to the point of playing. In addition to playing first trombone, Brown was given a solo spot. Ellington didn't write out the parts for him; he had to pick them up on the job. "For weeks I did that, for nothing." They were charging the band members a fee for a berth, chair cars, on the train, from LA to NY to Hartford, Connecticut. "On my first check they took out the money for my berth. So you see why, from the first week on, I hated these people. They had completely tricked me." Brown played four shows a day, parts and a solo on "Trees," for $70 a week.
Brown first appeared at Harlem's Cotton Club in 1933: "Stormy Weather" with Ethel Waters. The other band members accepted Brown immediately. "That was easy. Some were extraordinary, like Cootie and Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney."
When the band again came to LA for a movie appearance ("Check and Double-Check"?), Brown expected to be paid union scale; but by then, the studios were paying a reduced rate.
TRACK 2:
Europe, 1933: Irving Mills claimed to have little knowledge of the band's itinerary on their four-week European tour. "Lying like a dog."
The band was supposed to receive $100 a week. However, they were not paid for playing radio spots. They were owed $375 weekly for the four weeks. Mills never informed them of other dates on the itinerary; on the ship voyage to England, Mills announced that no radio work would be paid: "So many extras." They were supposed to be paid $25 a night for private parties, but the money never came.
In later years, Ellington modeled himself after Mills in such matters. Ellington genius? "He had a terrific memory and was a good listener"who routinely stole musical ideas from band members and turned them into new tunes for which he alone received credit. He stole a riff from Brown on his "Once in a While" solo. The best-known example was of Harry Carney and Johnny Hodges noodling a counter-melody to "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart," which Ellington stole for "Never No Lament," which later became a huge hit with lyrics added to become "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."
Some band members called DE "the Phony Duke"; Brown preferred "the Fabulous Fraud."
DE as pianist: Ellington "adored 'The Lion." He had the ability especially to attract women.
Strayhorn: "Ellington had uncanny luck, like manna from heaven." He couldn't even play "Lush Life." Strayhorn was a meek little person who allowed himself to be drawn into things." On "Something to Live For," the average person hears that as just a tune, but that's Strayhorn's story. He wrote the lyrics to everything he wrote. He was a genius. [Ellington] was not even in the same auditorium." He relied heavily on Strayhorn. But Strayhorn was "like a little kid." MGM tried to hire him away from Ellington, but Ellington told him, "You're not ready yet. I'll tell you when." Strayhorn would have gone, but he was "so dominated by [DE]." So Strayhorn turned MGM down. He always remained in Ellington's shadow.
"Flamingo" arrangement: DE "didn't care much for the song, so he had Strayhorn make an arrangement, but he had no introduction and no ending. I said, 'Tizol, this is reminiscent of "Chloe." So Tizol states the introduction [sings], and Ray Nance answers it [sings]. Then they go into the arrangement." Brown and Hodges took solos in the middle. At the ending, I said 'Same type as the beginning [sings]. Well, [DE] put it on as the sixth number of the record session, not thinking it was going to do anything. When the song became a hit, 'he like to died. Still that arrangement has never been surpassed. That was Billy Strayhorn from beginning to end. Ellington didn't write one note of it, but he still took credit for it.. Many numbers were done like that."
"To me the trombone should be played with beauty. In his youth, Brown would never play in the tailgate style common at the time. His first public performance was at Aimee Semple McPherson's temple on a Mothers Day. Accompanied by a pianist only, he played before an audience of 6,000.
Brown originated the style made famous by Tommy Dorsey, whom he knew well. He also admired a trombonist, Bobby Burns, who played in Jimmy Dorsey's band. Another, whose name he couldn't remember, played with him in the CBS studio orchestra in the late 1950s, before he rejoined Ellington.
Our conversation paused while we listened to "Something to Live For" being sung onstage. "That's the story of Billy Strayhorn and all those tunes he wrote about himself and his sorrow that he was not the person he would like to have been. And people never realized in his music that part of him... In his heart, he was unhappy. He was the genius."
Since Brown's retirement from music, people have sent him tapes of unreleased Strayhorn recordings with the Ellington band. "Just now he's just beginning to get credit. Ellington didn't do anything, shortly after [Strayhorn] came into the band." A lot of unknown manuscripts remained in Strayhorn's apartment after his death.
To Brown, Ellington's Sacred Concerts were an exercise in hypocrisy. "The seducer of women and the exploiter of me, that's all he was.
Of Ellington's family, Brown called his sister Ruth "the weirdest thing you ever saw." His son Mercer was an expert builder of model airplanes, headed toward an engineering career, but Duke discouraged him and insisted he join the band.
Track 3:
DE's true character: "He was good to you only when he could use you. He ruined more people's lives than you could ever imagine." Browns two descriptors of Ellington were "exploiter"
and"seducer."
leaves DE in 1951: Too much pressure following the band's 1950 European tour. Matters came to a head in March, 1951, when Johnny Hodges left to form his own small band along with Lawrence Brown and Al Sears. Brown's explanation to Stanley Dance had been that, rather than money, the three defectors left for musical reasons, so that they would have more room to improvise. But I can't believe that the ending of Brown's eighteen-year marriage to Fredi Washington that same year was merely coincidental.
Mills, DE methods to eliminate competitors: Irving Mills used his part-ownership of five strong properties (Ellington, Cab Calloway, the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, Ina Mae Hutton, and Hudson-DeLange) as leverage with his many associates to book his own talent, instead of someone represented by a leeser agency. Ellington, after leaving Mills, used the same methods to stifle the success of the Johnny Hodges group. Many people in the 1930s urged Ellington to ditch Irving Mills. But he chose instead to become a clone of Mills.
Sonny Greer, Ellington's cohort from the beginning, was fired in 1950 for drunkenness. Then why not Paul Gonsalves, whose drinking habits were well-known? Brown: Ellington was trying to show what a good guy he was, keeping an alcoholic in his saxophone section since 1950 until his death.
How does one pretend to be a nice guy, other than being a nice guy?
*
We agreed to meet again at his home the following weekend.
B. Leonard Feather, at his home, Sherman Oaks, CA
1. mic set-up in his living room. We sat on armchairs, my Dad seated a few feet away.
2. for about half an hour we spoke in generalities: BB&B controversy, John Hammond, etc.
3. I had come prepared with FBI records, notes on Duke's 1950 European tour and his signature on the antiwar Stockholm Peace Petition, Ellington's lawsuit against the CPUSA and article in the right-wing The New Leader. When I raised questions about DE's subsequent reaction to the Red Scare, Feather became defensive; after another 15 minutes, he was shouting at me and practically threw me out
THE NAME OF DE'S SON-IN-LAW? Daniel ________, probably wrote the New Leader piece.
 |
| Duke with Sid Kuller, 1941 |
C. Sid Kuller, at his home in Beverly Hills
1. revival of Jump for Joy, at Miami Beach's Copa City, Jan. 20-Feb. 8, 1959
a. large cast, including singers Barbara McNair, Timmie Rogers (accompanied by a vocal trio and full choir on "Show 'Em You Got Class."
b. Timner: "It appears that one entire show in the time span... was recorded live for the Columbia label; however, nothing hyas been released as yet [1996?].
"There is a tape circulating among collectors, which contains swome of the material listed..."
c. during our interview, Kuller played 3 tunes from his own cassette tape: I was able to hear an updated "I Got it Bad," Barbara McNair and Timmie Rogers on "The Natives Are Restless Tonight," and another song I can't remember. To my everlasting regret, I lost my own recording of the interview, including the songs.
2. Kuller with DE&HO touring the Soviet Union, 1971
a. hostility of USSR govt?
b. students from Patrice Lumumba University call Harry Carney a "nigger."
L.A. Times Obit, June 22, 1993
Henry Blankfort; Screenwriter Was Blacklisted in McCarthy Era
Henry Blankfort, 90, a screenwriter who became a publicist after he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era died Wednesday in North Hollywood of cardiac arrest. A native of New York, Blankfort moved to LA in 1936 and three years later became director of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, where he co=wrote its "Meet the People." He wrote or co-wrote 25 screenplays, including "Tales of Manhattan" and "Double Exposure." During World War II, Blankfort made military films for the Signal Corps. His show business career ended after he refused in 1951to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking information about Communists in Hollywood.
Interview, Studio City home, 8/13/82
Henry Blankfort spoke with me for two hours. Throughout our conversation, he was articulate, remembered the past vividly, and was eager to tell me his story. When I mentioned my earlier talk with Sid Kuller, Blankfort was surprised he was still alive and living in Beverly Hills. He resolved to give Kuller a call.
I. Genesis of Meet the People, 1939
HB was then the exec dir of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, described as "mostly a writers' hangout." Evolved into a co-op to produce cabaret theater in LA, music and schtick comedy. New York at the time had much more of this kind of entertainment.
Before MTP, the Alliance had conceived a play with the theme of fascism
The Alliance was not exactly a non-profit. It was a "less profit," out-of -pocket seed money. The performers were paid with whatever the show took in. Most of the Alliance's members were "left of liberal." (Not an organized CPUSA fraction!). Meet the People was strongly influenced by their outlook.
When trying to open the show as a cabaret, they couldn't get a liquor license. So MTP became instead a "variety show." HB: "tremendously successful... made me the executive director in charge of production." The creative team included Jay Gornay, H. Myers, for the music. The entire cast contributed skits at the ? Theater. The box office took in $24 on opening day. The columnist Hedda Hopper denounced the show "attacked all our principles, but audiences gave it standing ovations."
We continued talking about the Red Hunt, HUAC in the 1950s. MTP had a decidedly anti-racist thrust and introduced a song whose lyrics quoted the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. The show received bomb threats. But it was so successful that it was able to perform in ever larger venues in LA, even opened in San Francisco and aimed for Broadway. Initial stars were Jack Albert and Virginia O'Brien.
By the coincidence of O'Brien's having to leave the show, according to Blankfort, MTP was the very first show with a biracial cast, by the presence of the teen-aged Dorothy Dandridge (who would perform again in Ellington's show two years later). Blankfort auditioned her privately, away from the rest of the cast, but she was frightened and did badly at first and wanted to leave the room.
Blankfort followed her out and told her she'd been great. After continuing private rehearsals, Blankfort announced to the rest that Dandridge would replace O'Brien and ignored those who feared how audiences might react. Blankfort drove her home at night.
Dorothy Dandridge's movie career began (soon after?) with a contract with MGM.
"Sensational hit": The show kept changing sketches to remain involved in the issues of the day. There was an election campaign skit, in which an actor with his back to the audience turns to reveal his rubber mask of FDR. He goes on to perform a song, "The Same Old South." The show began making money. After touring a wider swath of Southern California, the show opened in SF. Parts of the show were also performed at strikers' picket lines.**
MTP was the longest-running Hollywood theater attraction for many years. The show spawned road companies and Actor's Lab classes. Blankfort himself earned $150 a week and left his usual job as a screenwriter for a time.
MTP ran successfully in SF and Chicago, but in New York its competition included the huge hit Pal Joey (Rodgers & Hart?) starring Gene Kelly, and consequently MTP closed after a very short run. In New York the critics regarded it as "outlanders from California invading the Bi9g Apple." Once the company returned home, some had the idea of mounting a MTP number two, but Blankfort was uncomfortable with it. In the end there was no serious intent about such a production."
But in the following year the Hollywood Theater Alliance conceived the idea of an all-Negro revue. Their first intent didn't attain fruition, but the following year a series of circumstances brought JFJ to another Hollywood theater smash hit.
HB met Sid Kuller, who then lived in Beverly Hills, whose screen writing a few years earlier. had contributed to the controversial (?) film Zero Hour. After they had exchanged ideas, the pair organized the American Revue Theater to have another try at an all-Negro revue. There was considerable support in the show business community.
Parenthetically, Blankfort was optimistic: "I have a feeling the space program is going to bring peace to the world. Nations, as they exist today, are a silly thing."
Blankfort supervised the entire production of JFJ.
*The title sounds like it might have inspired some ditties in Jump for Joy a couple of years later. Ellington's show was controversial in the same way.
**Answering an earlier question of mine about the direct involvement of the CPUSA, here remarked,
"Moscow had nothing to do with it. We went on to the subject of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, specifically a cartoon of Stalin dancing with Hitler, each one hiding a dagger
**********************************************************************************
RETURN TO CHICAGO, AUGUST 1982
Joe Igo, Kenosha
John Steiner, Kenosha
Tribune obit: Howard Reich
John Steiner, 91, widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on early Chicago jazz, Died Saturday, June 3, 2001...
Mr. Steiner, who was smitten with the music during the first great blossoming in Chicago in the 1920s, amassed a unique personal collection of about 35,000 records plus sheet music, newspaper articles and related ephemera. The collection will be housed in the Jazz Archive of the University of Chicago Library... Born in Milwaukee and trained as a chemist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Mr. Steiner nourished his emerging passion for jazz by spending weekends in the nightspots of Chicago's South Side. Early on he came to know key figures such as pianist Earl Hines and drummer Baby Dodds, and befriended members of the fabled Austin High Gang (including cornetist Jimmy McPartland and saxophonist Bud Freeman.
"He would take the train down from Milwaukee or Madison and make it a weekend in
Chicago, absorb as much of the club scene as he could, then sleep in the train station, recalled Richard Wang, professor of music at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"It was through his contacts with so many musicians he was able to begin to build his collection, and he was doing it in the 1930s, when most people were not interested in this music and its history in Chicago," added Wang.
"Without his research and appetite for Chicago music, we would be bereft information upon which future histories of this music will be based. He was the seminal figure in documenting the history of Chicago jazz."
Though Mr. Steiner worked full time as a research chemist and, in the 1960s and '70s, taught at UIC, he used his off-hours to document music in Chicago. In 1946, he dragged a portable recording machine to the Civic Opera House, climbed the catwalk above the stage, dangled a microphone below and captured the DE Orchestra on recordings that would not have existed without such efforts.
As self-styled oral historian, he taped hundreds of hours of interviews, but the exact contents of this will not be known for years, since U. of C. archivists will have to catalog two truckloads of material.
"It's a treasure-trove, said curator Gillespie, "but it's also a preservation nightmare."
In the 1940s, Mr. Steiner promoted concerts featuring McPartland and Freeman, among others, and with Hugh Davis started S&D Records to issue Chicago jazz recordings. By leasing and, in 1949, purchasing the catalogue of the old Paramount record label, Mr. Steiner was able to reissue historic recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, among others.
Descriptive summary of John Steiner Collection
471 boxes
contains sheet music, articles, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, interviews, ephemera, and publications
Steiner: 7/21/1908, Milwaukee - 6/3/2001, Milwaukee
at the age of 12 he became the hat-check person at his father's music lodge in Milwaukee
took piano lessons at home and while at UWIS; also attended Axel Christianson's music school
as a teenager fixed his friends' radios and would hear a variety of music
his aunt Juliana, who worked qat a music store, would bring home chipped phonographs for him to listen
the ODJB made an impression on Steiner early on
Steiner was present at one of our Ellington Society gatherings when he gave me a copy of Duke's "Jig Walk on an ancient-looking 78 rpm record; he held the rights to that transcription of a piano roll from the 1920s. I recall Dick Buckley being there, too, along with Henry Quarles, all the way from Pewaukee, Wisconsin. Henry handed me a copy of an Index to Music Is My Mistress, an eighty-two page pamphlet by H. F. Huon, which was packed with useful information. I wish it were still in print.
Within a month of my sojourn in Southern California, along with other Chicagoans I attended what turned out to be the second annual international Ellington convention in Detroit (the first had been in New York the year prior). The first Ellington experts I met were Brooks Kerr and Jerry Valburn. Jerry was proud to show me the Ellington logo he'd fashioned for one of his several record labels.
Dick Buckley interview of Benny Aasland at the 1981 conversation in NY
described
Aasland's "chiseled features" description
remembers his thick Swedish accent: "Echoes of the "Yoongle"
Benny relates the enthusiasm for jazz all over the world
He said that he enjoyed "the entire spectrum of Ellington," not just the Cotton Club band, the Blanton-Webster band or the Newport band.
I knew next to nothing about Brooks Kerr, save that he was reputed to be a walking encyclopedia of Ellingtonia. He was a few years younger than I, but from the age of 28 was totally blind due to a degenerative retinal disease and glaucoma. He learned to play piano by assigning colors in his mind for each key. He studied formally at nearby Yale University and the Foote School. For a few years in the 1950s, he took private lessons from Jean Brown and a few years later worked with Russell Regain New Haven. Starting in 1964, he studied for eight years with Sanford Gold, at the Dalton School, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Juilliard School in New York. At points along the way, Kerr studied jazz with pianists Lucky Roberts and Willie "The Lion" Smith.
Following Ellington's death in 1974, Brooks recorded an album with Sonny Greer on the Chiaroscuro label, Soda Fountain Rag, and now in 1982 he honored my request for New World A-Comin' at the grand piano in the hotel lobby. For his presentation the following afternoon, however, he used his portable Cassio electronic keyboard. He entertained us with stories and demonstrated a couple of rarely-heard. post-"Soda Fountain Rag" Ellington composition, first one titled "Bitches Ball" (a fragment of which appeared in the final movement of Black, Brown and Beige), and with lyrics the self-explanatory "Whatcha Gonna Do When the Bed Breaks Down." Following these, he proceeded to demonstrate the ribald lyrics of "The Boy in the Boat," whose cleaned-up successor was Fats Waller's famous "Squeeze Me."
Washington, DC, 1983
Dr. Maurice Banks was a childhood friend of Mercer Ellington's and met his father often.
He was soft-spoken, polite, and took to me immediately.
google photo?
visit to Chicago
I got a chance to meet Alice Babs and her husband, Nils Lindberg. They invited me to sit with them, and for the few minutes we talked together they treated me like someone important, something I could never forget.
I was familiar with Babs's voice chiefly from Serenade to Sweden, the Reprise album that she made along with Duke in Paris in 1963. Babs told me that Ellington had asked her to choose from his repertoire, and I replied I was pleased she chose "Take Love Easy" from Beggar's Holiday, as I was exploring that subject at the time. Later on she went before the attendees to introduce a video production of Ellington's Second Sacred Concert from 1967 in which she herself, of course, was a participant.
The video to be presented was recorded in a cathedral in Sweden. After remarking how little time she had to speak-- "Too much to tell; you could fill a book"-- Babs began her introduction by recalling her first glimpse of Ellington in Stockholm, during the band's European tour in 1939. She described that encounter as "the kick of my life."
In those years she was child a movie star, rather like a Swedish version of Hollywood's Judy Garland. From the age of thirteen, she had listened to every Ellington record she could find, but by the time her idol returned to Sweden in 1963, Babs, then in her forties, had retired from show business and started a family. Along the Scandinavian arc of his European tour, Ellington invited her to sing with the Orchestra on an upcoming Swedish television appearance. (The song they performed happened to be "Take Love Easy.")
Soon after this appearance came a telephone call from Duke in Paris. The studio session he arranged a short time later, with the backing of Ellington himself with a small combo of local musicians, initiated a new singing career for Alice Babs.
the complete album
Babs told us that "TGTT" was one of her favorites and that Ellington always allowed her a few bars of vocal improvisation. She became a bit teary-eyed as she recalled his subsequent invitation to join him as a companion touring the United States. To the skeptics among us, she advised we not "close the doors to beautiful music. They are so great, the choir in this concert [video]."
Before ending her introduction, Babs remarked that Ellington had told her, "I feel at times I''m God's messenger boy,"with regard to his musical mission late in his career.
Alice Babs went on to perform in Ellington's Third Sacred Concert: The Majesty of God at Westminster Abbey on United Nations Day in October,1973 and at the Basilica del Santa del Mar in Barcelona the following month. It has not been performed since.
*
In 1984, the annual convention was held in Oldham, England. I couldn't make that trip, but I caught a break when it moved to Chicago in May,1985. Willis Conover, famed jazz d.j. for the Voice of America overseas, was present, as was Gunther Schuller. He too had received a copy of my 1980 thesis, but he'd had no time to read it. Mark Tucker, just lately out of the University of Michigan's college of music, talked about his still-un published study, Early Ellington. (He was not impressed by my attempt at "Black and Tan Fantasy" between sessions on the piano at the conference dais.). John Steiner, along with his Chicago cohorts, spoke to the assembly as well. But the most interesting talk of all was that of Robert E. Johnson, the former executive editor of Jet magazine.
Through his career as a journalist, Johnson became a longtime and intimate associate of Ellington, as close to Ellington as anyone outside his family could be. When speaking to Johnson, Duke always addressed him as "Ro-Bear," in the French manner). His presentation, "More Conversations with Duke,"concerned Ellington's opinions on almost everything: journalists in general, as a parent, on education, his band personnel, consistency, religiosity; as a "libertarian," on race; as a role model, and finally the way he was portrayed by Johnson Publishers the parent company of Jet.
Eddie Lambert, one of the UK's foremost Ellington experts, spoke the same day. I had the pleasure of meeting him and his companion, Elaine Norsworthy, between sessions. It had been Eddie Lambert's Ellington entry in Jazz On Record that had given me a great start collecting records, but he was surprised to hear that a relatively short piece could have impressed a jazz enthusiast halfway around the world. Eddie's presentation to the. convention concerned his findings leading up to the publication of his Duke Ellington: A Listener's Guide in 1992.
Then it was my own turn to speak on the subject of Ellington's first visit to Chicago in 1931. (The audience couldn't see my knees trembling at the start, and they laughed at a joke I told while a reel of recording tape was replaced.) I began with the need of a multi-dimensional look at Duke's career and then proceeded with my account of Ellington's first visit to Chicago in 1931, built of clippings from the local press.
Rutgers University Newark, Institute of Jazz Studies, 1986
Author and curator of the Institute, Dan Morgenstern, Martin Williams, one of the world's most admired jazz writers. I don't remember much about Morgenstern's conference presentation, I still remember and agree with his opinion that the music for Anatomy of a Murder was almost too good for the movie.
presentation on Jump for Joy
Willard herself reported the Ellington Conference 2016 in DownBeat magazine.
Willard became the first woman to receive the
Klause Stratemann's. Duke Ellington: Day by Day and Film by Film was published in 1999.
3. Sjef Hoefsmidt
DEMS memorial to Eddie Lambert and Claus Stratemann
 |
| Benny Aasland |
VI. The 1990s forward
phone call to Joya Sherrill in New York; her own lyrics to "Take the 'A' Train." We agreed that Duke Ellington was "larger than life."
A. I realized I'd got in over my head in the ocean of Ellingtonia and took a break to listen to other music and restore my balance.
B. took out a subscription to Blue Light from 2016 until the COVID pandemic in 2020.
C. found out this year that the editor is interested in my stuff, so there should be new articles ahead, old and new.
D. a colorful, interactive version of this piece can be found on my blog at
http://dancai.blogspot.com/2021/12/memories-of-alice-babs.html
IN ROTATION:
Brian Wilson,What I Really Want for Christmas (Arista, 2005)
Coming on the heels of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, Brian's solo Christmas album is one to put under the tree. It doesn't really compare with The Beach Boys Christmas Album from 1964, one of the finest yuletide albums ever. But it does have a some delights of its own, particularly three new, charming "Christmasy" songs.
- Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Mike Love, Bruce Johnston and Special Guests, Symphonic Sounds: Music of The Beach Boys (Platinum Entertainment, 1998)
The jury is still out, but I believe this one will far out shine the following recording:
- The Beach Boys with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Capitol, 2018)
Yecchhh! The Beach Boys and Capitol Records agreed to piss on the group's greatest hits.
- Miles Davis, The Columbia Years, 1956-1985 (CBS 5-LP box set, 1988)
- Elis Regina, Luz Das Estrelas (Som Livre/ Gala, 1982)
A year after Elis's death, her brother Rogerio extracted all the tracks in this album; the vocals were then overdubbed on a prerecorded backing track and given a lot of echo, with only one exception, All of the selections are excellent but from this perspective the tracks sound dated '80s-style, full of synths and drum machines and tinny effects. But Elis, even posthumously, didn't seem to care who was in accompaniment.
The one exception I mentioned, "Velho Arvaredo," is a perfect demonstration, in its first verse, of how beautiful a woman's voice can be while accompanied by a solo guitar.
NEXT: Ellington's Harlem Suite
