BROOKS KERR, AUGUST 1982, DETROIT, HOTEL PONCHARTRAIN
Almost immediately following my Southern California sojourn came the second-- or third, depending on where one starts-- annual convention of the Duke Ellington Study Group, organized, in part, by the Duke Ellington Music Society (DEMS) through their international Bulletin.
Upon arriving with the Chicago delegation, the first people I met were Jerry Valburn, whose mission it was to rescue discarded Ellington recordings and put them out on his own labels, and pianist Brooks Kerr. He was engaged to a woman named Violet at the time. Brooks, whose reputation as a walking encyclopedia of Ellingtonia, obliged my request to play "New World A-Coming" on the grand piano in the hotel lobby.
The following day, Brooks made a presentation to all of us, with his portable Casio keyboard. Somewhere in there Brooks informed us about the original lyrics to "Squeeze Me," by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, now cleaned up from its original title, "The Boy in the Boat." We were further informed that the title was a metaphorical reference to a woman's clitoris.
The following represents the portion of his talk devoted to Ellington
"[Ellington had just finished the] 'Such Sweet Thunder' album for Columbia, and Duke used to come to town [Hartford, Connecticut] once a year. So. for us living in the city, his once-a-year visit was very important. We always flocked to hear his latest compositions. I'm going to approach this a little proactively. I'd like to open with what I believe was his second composition, which he wrote in high school. The first was "Soda Fountain Rag," which I had the pleasure of recording in 1974, with Sonny Greer, on the Chiaroscuro label.
"The second composition-- I last heard Ellington play it at a restaurant called Leonard Stroud, where he was celebrating his seventy-third birthday -- that was in 1972. To commemorate his birthday, he sat down at the piano-- he had an electric piano that he loved to carry around-- when he sang this following lyric, which he used to play in Washington at the high-school dances of that period. He became quite a popular guy in high school for songs like this and topical lyrics, such as this. Duke's second piece was called "What You Going to Do When the Bed Breaks Down." It's very short, only sixteen bars long, but you can hear the first theme. [Plays three choruses on his Cassio electric piano]:
Tried it on the table, tried it on the chair
Tried it on the sofa, but I didn't get nowhere.
What you gonna do when the bed breaks down?
You got to work out on the floor.
"You know how Duke would talk and sing it like this: [demonstrates]. That was his seventy-third birthday present to us.
"There exists another fragment, which he claimed was in Black, Brown and Beige, that was composed in this period, around 1914. It was a little piano sequence. It appears also in certain versions of "Cotton Tail." It was a little thing called "Bitches Ball," which is a stride thing similar to James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout." [demonstrates]at
"That is the fragment, also heard in "Cotton Tail." It was also in one of [French] Columbia's sets, and the middle section was with Sam Woodyard. It's called "Piano Improvisation in Three Parts."
ALICE BABS, WASHINGTON, D.C. 1983
The following year the convention expanded exponentially, in general attendance and in the number of speakers and presenters, including Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern, Billy Taylor, Sr; June Norton, Jimmy McPhail, Jerry Valburn (who presented an evening of Ellington films), Patricia Willard (on Jump for Joy and the recording to be issued on the Smithsonian label), Willis Conover, and an open discussion among Eddie Lambert (UK), Klaus Stratemann (Denmark), and Sjef Hoefsmit (Sweden).
Some of the Chicago delegation traveled to Chevy Chase, Maryland, to the home of sound engineer supreme, Jack Towers. Not only did we meet him personally; we also were treated to a tour of his basement sanctuary, where we viewed and heard the original sixteen-inch master of Ellington's Fargo recording from 1940.
Finally, I met a member of the Washington Ellington Society, Dr. Maurice Banks, who was a childhood friend of Mercer Ellington's and met Duke often. He was soft-spoken, polite, and took to me immediately. We visited each other over the coming years as good friends.
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 remember her telling me that Duke allowed her to choose the tunes for the 1963 Paris recording of the album Serenade to Sweden. 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.")
the complete album
"I can't tell you how happy I am to be here; it's like a dream. And a dream it was also for me to sing with Duke Ellington. My wildest dream came true. You know, when your heart is full, your mouth wants to talk about it, and we all have parts of our hearts in Duke Ellington. There is so much to tell you about how I happened to work with him, I could fill a book and talk throughout my stay here. Of course, you must be wondering how a Swedish singer came to sing with Duke Ellington
"It started when I was a young girl. I collected his recordings, but the first two years, I was only thirteen, I didn't have money to buy them. So, I went to a shop; I heard them selling the records there, and I had permission to listen to many of the recordings. But two years later I started my career as a singer; I was fifteen then. The first concert I went to, at the concert hall in Stockholm, was Duke Ellington, and it gave me the kick of my lifetime. I had the nerve to say in interviews that it was my life's ambition get to sing with Duke Ellington. Can you imagine?
"Twenty years later, I was ready for it. It happened that a friend of mine who knew I was very fond of Duke Ellington's music was the producer of a program with the orchestra. She was going to do the choreography, and there were dancers from the Royal Opera, and I was chosen to sing with Duke Ellington.
"But I was not in the business. I had three children and didn't want to tour. Then one day I got a phone call, and my friend, who had done an album with me, asked me, 'Would you like to do a program for tv with Duke Ellington?' He didn't hear a sound from me! I sat down, and after a while I was able to stand. 'Of course I would like to.' I was in the kitchen when he called, you know. "During one-and-a half year's time, I had been going to a professor to study, although I didn't really intend to go back to my career, because I was so fond of my family life. I didn't want to go away from my children, yet here I was again on the stage with Duke Ellington, '63.
"One month later he called me from Paris and asked me, 'On Monday, would you like to come to Lauren and make a recording with me?' It was Sunday in Sweden, and I said, 'I cannot come tomorrow, but three days later I was there, and a few days later we had the album ready. As you hear, it's small pieces written by Ellington that he gave me. He said, 'I will give you a background of four French horns, and we'll see what everything's like.' There was a lot of improvisation in it, and when he wanted me to sing up, he pointed this way, and when he wanted me to sing down, he pointed that way!
"Every time he came to Sweden I joined in, and it happened to be on his birthday in 1967. He said that Ella had to sing in Berlin, and he asked me, 'Would you like to come with me and do two concerts with me?' We had no rehearsals at all, and I made two concerts with him. I sang, which I also did in the theater program, 'Come Sunday,' and that was a song I also recorded with him. I think that it had grown in his mind that perhaps he could use me and my voice in Sacred Concerts, songs like 'Come Sunday' and Negro spirituals. I had already done that in churches in Sweden.
"In the same year he asked me, 'Would you like, in one year's time, to come to New York and sing in my Sacred Concert, which I'm working on." I really was ready for it at the time. It was the first Sacred Concert for me, but it was the second for Duke Ellington. And then there was another opportunity two years later, with many concerts in between. I don't want to talk too much, because I want to show the program, but that was the Sacred Concert number three. That was a long concert. It was only performed once, at Westminster Abbey.
"What can I say about the second Sacred Concert? When I first came to New York, it was eleven days before we had the premiere, but Duke Ellington was not in New York, so I began to be nervous. Two days later he came, and I had no songs, nothing. In Sweden, they had big papers about it, big columns and writeups. I was really very worried.
"Then, nine days before the concert, he invited me to his home. He played a little melody, and I immediately sang it. I'm going with my musical intuition, so I just sang it with memories of moments, my whole life. That was 'ching-ching-ching ching.' All the melody was not on paper: there were parts that he really wanted me to fill in, so I did what I felt like. And that was the case for many of the other songs; there were a few bars left where I could do whatever I wanted.
"That was so great! I really relished the thrill to be invited to do that, with my Maestro. You can't imagine. I'm still that little girl listening to his recordings, and then suddenly being invited to be his companion! I could never get over that, you know. I've been crying and I've been laughing today, and I've been enjoying it tremendously.
"But it's funny with us people. We always go back to where it started, and then I'm bringing all the things I have experienced. But why talk about it? Why don't we just listen to the sacred part of Duke Ellington? I'm sorry to say that there are many jazz fans who don't give this part of Ellington time enough. They close their doors to beautiful ballads. They are too afraid. The choir singing here in this concert of Duke Ellington sing in a more classical way than he was used to hear them. It's so pure, the music, crystal clear, and many of his thoughts in the lyrics are for eternity. He said to me, "Alice, sometimes I feel that I am God's messenger boy."
"So, let's listen now to this Sacred Concert from Stockholm, 1969."
