I was a child of the '60s and therefore came of age during the golden age of rock and roll. Three currents at once drew me to jazz at the age of eighteen: a school friend with a little collection of jazz recordings; my brother, an aspiring jazz trumpeter; and, in my freshman year at Indiana University, the tutelage of Dr. David N. Baker (later to become director of the Smithsonian Institution's jazz program). It was in David's class I first heard "East St. Louis
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.
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 perform in a quartet with his fellow Ellingtonian, Clark Terry. To WBEZ radio host Neil Tesser, neither had a bad word to say about Ellington.
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.)
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 (of most value for its discography of Ellington’s early recordings) , 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 Toad Hall in 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.
.
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 TRIO. 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?)
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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
*
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-unpublished 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."
When I began to look into the subject of Duke Ellington in the late 1970s, Bob Koester, owner of the Jazz Record Mart in downtown Chicago, told me that there could never be too much written about Duke. While this may not be entirely true, at that time, just a few years after Ellington’s death, there was a dearth of published information about the man and his music. As the 1999 centennial of his birth approached, however, the trickle of books about Ellington grew into flood, from pundits and professors alike, and the record labels began cranking out box sets to chronicle his music.
Since that time, most books devoted to Ellington have been directed to musicians and musicologists. The few biographies I’ve seen repeat the hoary old myth that, after the Second World War, the quality of his music went into a tailspin; writers still insist that the early ‘40s—the so-called Blanton-Webster band—represented the pinnacle of Ellington’s achievement; the rest of his career was a steep decline. One exception was the 2010 publication of Duke Ellington’s America by Professor Harvey Cohen, in which the focus is on America, as well as Ellington. Cohen’s book presents a multidimensional version of Ellington, a man of not only music but also of politics, economics, race, along with his complex personal life. I have taken the same approach for the past forty years.
My primary aim is to examine the exploitation of Black musical culture in America over the course of the past century. In particular, since the most outstanding cultural contribution of Black American culture has been in the field of music and related arts, I will restrict my investigation to this area. I will attempt to show that the origin, growth, and development of what is now an enormously powerful entertainment industry, controlled almost exclusively by whites, arose as the consequence of the c
 |
| from the copy of Ulanov's book I bought at Toad Hall |
DEMS memorial to Eddie Lambert and Claus Stratemann
 |
| Benny Aasland |
*
When I began to look into the subject of Duke Ellington in the late 1970s, Bob Koester, owner of the Jazz Record Mart in downtown Chicago, told me that there could never be too much written about Duke. While this may not be entirely true, at that time, just a few years after Ellington’s death, there was a dearth of published information about the man and his music. As the 1999 centennial of his birth approached, however, the trickle of books about Ellington grew into flood, from pundits and professors alike, and the record labels began cranking out box sets to chronicle his music.
Since that time, most books devoted to Ellington have been directed to musicians and musicologists. The few biographies I’ve seen repeat the hoary old myth that, after the Second World War, the quality of his music went into a tailspin; writers still insist that the early ‘40s—the so-called Blanton-Webster band—represented the pinnacle of Ellington’s achievement; the rest of his career was a steep decline. One exception was the 2010 publication of Duke Ellington’s America by Professor Harvey Cohen, in which the focus is on America, as well as Ellington. Cohen’s book presents a multidimensional version of Ellington, a man of not only music but also of politics, economics, race, along with his complex personal life. I have taken the same approach for the past forty years.
Much remains to be done in the study of Duke Ellington. For some people, this might not be so obvious. After all, as much or more has been said about Duke than nearly any other jazzman, I think it's fair to say that we are indebted to the pioneers of Ellington scholarship who have over the years contributed their own insights into Ellington's awe-inspiring career,
But it's equally fair to say that all of these works together-- the biographies, the musical analyses-- only begin to examine the many meanings of Ellington's career. To one degree or another, all of them fall short of revealing the whole of Duke Ellington, however excellent or even indispensable some of them may be. In other words, the book on Duke Ellington has not been written, nor is it likely to be written for some time to come.
I used to think I was the one to write such a book. I'm afraid I'll have to be a bit more modest about what I'm doing, for various problems I'll name as they come up. When such a book does come, it will have to be written not by a single person, but perhaps by a committee of talented people in different disciplines. Their task will be one of formidable scope.
The process by which I arrived at Duke was a circuitous one, a rather strange and involved one, as it would have to be for someone my age. In the late 1960s, I began a gradual transition from rock 'n' roll to the likes of Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra. From there, it has been a case of looking back ward, where Duke Ellington could hardly fail to attract my attention. There is a seductive quality in his work that is hard to resist.
Nevertheless, it was unlikely then that a person of my age would take to Ellington's music, nor is it likely that it will become any easier for generations following mine. You might call this the musical miseducation of youth; in the United States particularly, the laws of economics in the music business, or just the inevitability of change in styles. The Ellington Era is now firmly in the past, despite the talents and efforts of many to preserve it as America's "classical" music.
To state that more positively, the vast territory of Ellingtonia a field most rewarding to the historian, who makes it his business to uncover the past. As historians, however, our obligation to be thorough is imperative. At this late date, more than fifty years after Duke Ellington's death, the obstacles confronting us are very real.
The Ellington historian's subject is a career that spans fifty years and almost every venue north of the South Pole. At the same time, our opportunity to talk directly to the survivors of the Ellington Era-- the veterans of the Cotton Club, of the Trocadero in London, the Regal Theatre in Chicago, and so on-- is vanishing rapidly, day by day and year by year.
Added to this is the historian's responsibility to bring a new perspective to the events he narrates, He has to know what he's looking for, be able to interpret it within a larger context, and balance his meticulous research in a satisfactory way.
We're well past the point where we need another broad rehash of Ellington's life and the celebrated milestones in it. Yet there is much more to be discovered in Ellington's multi-dimensional life, if we choose a perspective outside the boundaries of jazz.
from what we read, the collective portrait of Ellington in print is confusing and contradictory. The literature tends toward one of two extremes: Music Is My Mistress, with its avalanche of names and places, presents its author as a man with an insatiable appetite for the applause of the entire world, setting forth on a career of conquest, titles, and awards, against the barriers of musical category. This is the side of Ellington most fully explored in the 1940s by Barry Ulanov, the author of the first Duke Ellington biography. Writing much in the fashion of Dr. Sidney Finkelstein, Ulanov was explicit about the social roots of musical categories, and he presents Duke and his orchestra as a product of specific social forces, from Washington, D.C. onwards.
At the other extreme, we have another Duke Ellington entirely, a man who lived on some pinnacle in the realm of Art, a god who had no interest in monetary matters. Ellington himself often said as much, never mind the intrusions of wars, revolutions, and depressions. To be sure, this was a side of Ellington, but it is misleading to accept it wholly. We need to views Ellington in all of his dimensions: musical, social, racial, political, economic, and so on, to learn the lessons his life holds for the twenty-first century.
Ellington's music is central, of course, but we must think of it as the expression of a personality, actually a collective personality of a most unique kind, shaped, as all of us are, by forces of the here and now. Too often, the Ellington we meet between the covers of a book is a man of no dimension broader than music. We get a sanitized version of Ellington, the Ellington of the publicity machines, the magazines, the Voice of America, and the State Department.
Surely, there is a real Duke Ellington, a human being of many self-contradictions, a man of many mistresses, who has a story more fascinating and enlightening than even he knew.
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