Ellingtonia

They have a Duke Ellington celebration today on WKCR streaming on the internet. If you live in New York City you could just use a radio to listen to it. Of course, i'm a huge Ellington fanatic. The only thing I like just about as much is Johnny Hodges or Billy Strayhorn. What I like about Ellington's music is that it is an entire world unto itself. You could listen to it for several years and not quite exhaust it.

Of course, I love other composers, bandleaders, and instrumentalists just about as much, but very few have that scope that make them whole countries or worlds of music. I realize this is a quantitative judgment, but so much of the music is so damned good too, and it stretches from the 20s to the 70s... The fact that some of the music might not be as great hardly seems to matter.

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Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster

Mulligan liked to do these "meets" albums. He did an excellent one with another Ellington sideman, Johnny Hodges, and with Monk--among others. Mel Lewis plays drums. The combination of two distinctive sounds is what makes this album great. Mulligan's joyful, bouncy, and exuberant lilt, played with that baritone fullness, and Webster's whispery wistful attack. Both players have a little raspiness, though of course Mulligan is much "smoother." I don't know that this is the greatest either played, but it's a very tasty outing.

Their version of Strayhorn's "Chelsea Bridge" is excellent. "In a Mellotone" is also from the Ellington catalogue. "Who's Got Rhythm" is a "Rhythm Changes" tune, taken at a very swinging medium tempo. They also do a version of Cole Porter's "What is this thing called love."

Being a casual fan of Duke is fine. That's what I always was before 2009. But, to paraphrase Kenneth Koch, it's a little bit like hanging around but not attending a school, or "almost" being in love with someone. To see Ellington whole opens up entire vistas; there is a whole lot of there there that the casual fan is missing. I'm about an eighth of the way there now, to where I want to be, not to a complete reckoning (which I'll probably never attain).

It's not a matter of loving everything equally, but of exploring a vast territory with many interesting corners.

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Masterpieces by Ellington.

This is an Ellington/Strayhorn album from the fifties with absolutely great arrangement on Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, Solitude, Smada, etc... The arrangements are longer given the new record format that allowed for more than three and a half minute songs. A 15 minute Mood Indigo!

My year of Ellington is already paying off huge benefits. A whole nother dimension has opened up into my listening: I think I was already good at hearing polyphonic voices, listening, say, to bass drums and piano with a horn on top. I didn't have quite the appreciation of orchestral textures and voicings, layered timbres, and structural shifts in timbres--the specialty of both Ellington and Strayhorn as composers/arrangers. I got some of this from Gil Evans and his collaborations with Miles, of course, and from some of the "cool jazz" school. But to see where all this started is a rare privilege. I'm enjoying the "replacement of ignorance with knowledge."

I consciously stretch my capabilities. For example, I am starting a theater reading project. Since I rarely read a play (who does?) I am missing out on certain insights that I might otherwise have. I will read 400 plays over the next several years and see what comes of that.

I found out that the music Strayhorn wrote for the 1953 production of Lorca's play in the Artists' Theatre has been recorded by the Dutch Jazz Orrchestra. There are four pieces of music, two quite lovely songs (Love, Love and The Flowers Die of Love) and two instrumentals (Sprite Music and Wounded Love). There is more information in Walter van de Leur's Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, a quite wonderful book I'm reading now. Wonderful in part because the author looked at thousands of Strayhorn scores.

I'm keeping my new year's resolution of studying the music of Ellington and Strayhorn, and in the process becoming more of a Strayhornian, which we might define as someone who views Strayhorn as much more than a "Duke Jr.," who views his contributions as those of an independent force, who does indeed care what Strayhorn wrote and what Duke wrote and is interested in the differences between the two composers--though with zero interest in diminishing Duke in any way. I reject the Collier view of Ellington's musical deficiencies.

I'm mulling over an article about the Artists' Theatre production of Lorca's play. I'm not sure there's enough there yet to justify more than a brief note in the encyclopedia of Lorca trivia. The Artists' Theatre itself is quite fascinating. I have a book that contains four plays produced there, by O'Hara, Ashbery, Merrill, and Abel. Merrill's play "The Bait" is quite superb, as is Lionel Abel's "Absalom." I already knew the plays by O'Hara and Ashbery.

Alfred Leslie's sets for Lorca's Don Perlimplín were destroyed in a fire in the 1970s.

Reading the David Hajdu biography of Billy Strayhorn, Lush Life. I began to refine my perceptions of Strayhorn's music in relation to that of Ellington. First of, to the extent that it's possible to isolate a Strayhorn sound, separate from Duke, I think it's a particular poignancy you can hear in "Chelsea Bridge" and "Passion Flower." A second category would be music that wouldn't exist with Strayhorn but that doesn't necessarily have that Strayhorn coloration, like "Some Sweet Thunder." Stayhorn was in no way Duke's inferior as a composer, and the case could even be made in the opposite direction. Certainly the younger man was the more schooled musician, both as composer/arranger and as pianist. He could compose a score on paper, without a piano, while other music played in the background. Also a more educated and bookish person than Duke. Duke maybe taught him some things, but most of it Strayhorn already knew or figured out himself. Duke knew how to keep him close, deliberately preventing him from striking out on his own--to the point of telling others who wanted to hire them that Billy wasn't that great! There was no written contract between the two men. Ellington just paid for everything from rent to food and gave him a share of his publishing company.

Strayhorn liked to be in the shadow of the Duke to a certain extent, because then he could live the way he wanted with not much public scrutiny. He never hid the fact that he was gay from anyone. Ellington exploited this, though, and took full credit for things that the two had composed together--or even for things that Strayhorn had done with little or no input from Ellington at all. For the casual public Ellington was the great man, and Strayhorn just an arranger in his band, if they were conscious of him at all.

Even side projects by Ellington folk like Strayhorn, Hodges, etc... tended toward the Ellingtonian. If Hodges made a record on his own, he would just hire other Ellington side men and play songs by Tizol, Strayhorn, or Ellington himself. A few players who passed through had their own independent identities, but those tended to the ones who didn't stay quite as long, like Ben Webster or Oscar Pettiford.

I never knew that Billy Strayhorn had written music for a production of Lorca's Don Perlimplín for The Artist's Theater! Maybe I'll have to write another book about Lorca.

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Ellington. Never No Lament: The Blanton/Webster Years

This is a three cd set I have been listening to since Christmas and gradually absorbing. I'm not crazy about the vocal numbers. Ivie Anderson anyone? They seem to date faster than the instrumentals, because of their "novelty tune" character. I don't know what the technical definition of a novelty song is; I just think it as a catchy song with a stupid lyric.

This was Ellington's band with bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor sax Ben Webster, but it was also the band that Billy Strayhorn first contributed to, in the early 40s. It represents one of the high points of Ellingtonia, even if you can't stand Tricky Sam Nanton. One of the pleasures is finding lesser known tunes. Everyone's heard "Cottontail" or "Take the A-Train," which are also here.

"Never No Lament" is actually the same tune as "Don't Get Around Much Any More," just like "Concerto for Cootie" is also better known as "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me."

Why Duke? I am not sure why I chose that particular subject as my new year's resolution. I think it's because there is a lot there: a lot of music, a lot of critical commentary by others. There's a historical depth to a figure who was active from the 20s to the 70s. That's part of six separate decades. On the other hand, my current knowledge is relatively limited. I'm not the guy who knows who played trumpet in every encarnation of the Ellington band--though I would like to be that guy. There's a potential for great excesses of nerdiness here, which is always attractive.

I don't love all of Duke's music equally, nor am I am unqualified admirer or partisan. I don't have that passionate feeling that people who aren't Ellingtonians are despicable philistines, or a deep personal identification that clouds my vision. This also makes Ellington a better choice then, say, Monk. it will force me to investigate older forms of jazz, getting me out of my bop and hard bop rut, while allowing me to pursue my interest in the "Great American Songbook," to which Duke contributed a great number of compositions. I have about 11 hours of Duke Ellington music on my hard drive, so I won't have to make a substantial financial investment for this project either. I can listen to his music on long car drives or in my office while doing other things.

From the intellectual and cultural point of view, i think there are interesting questions to be considered. In particular the space that Ellington occupies in the "aspirational" uses of jazz. His music aspires toward (and achieves) a certain genteel quality which has an attractively pleasant middle-brow quality while still being pretty damned good.

Finally, there is Johnny Hodges, one of my favorite players, and a mainstay of the DE Orchestra for many years; Ben Webster; Billie Strayhorn, Duke's co-composer. In other words, the subject is finite, but at the same time not easily exhaustible.