The Year of Tony Bennett

An Appreciation of the Art and Music of Tony Bennett

By Leave a Comment

Duke Ellington Post-Newport

The outstanding success  at Newport helped revive Duke Ellington’s career, including a new recording contract with Columbia. That same summer, he broke another barrier by being the first jazz musician featured on the cover of Time Magazine.

Duke Ellington - Time Magazine

Ellington and the Orchestra were once again in demand for live performances, including an invitation to the first Monterey Jazz Festival and a very successful European tour.

At this same time, Ellington became heavily involved in his more serious composition work that was predominant in the last part of his career.  Two projects that brought him and Billy Strayhorn great acclaim were their scores for the films Anatomy of a Murder (1959, directed by Otto Preminger, which won two Grammy Awards for composition, including Best Soundtrack Album) and Paris Blues (1961).  Other significant serious works from Ellington and Strayhorn included The Far East Suite and Such Sweet Thunder.

But the most important of these compositions were his three Sacred Concerts in 1965, 1968 and 1973. In these concerts, Ellington and Strayhorn chose to blend Christian liturgy with jazz.  The first Sacred Concert was held at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and repeated again at St. John the Divine in New York in December, 1965.  Critic Richard Ginell (allmusic.com) gave the recording of the concert five stars and said:

… the concert taps into Ellington’s roots in showbiz and African-American culture as well as his evidently deep religious faith, throwing it all together in the spirit of universality and sealing everything with the stamps of his musical signatures.

Billy Strayhorn died much too young, at the age of 51 in Mary,  1967 from cancer. Even in last days, he was still writing songs. His final composition, obviously influenced by his hospitalization, was called Blood Count.  Several months after his death, Ellington released a memorial album to Strayhorn entitled …And His Mother Called Him Bill, which won the 1968 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Large Group.

By the time of the third Sacred Concert, named The Majesty of God, in 1973, Ellington knew that his health was failing. He died from lung cancer and pneumonia on May 24, 1974, just a month after his 75th birthday. His funeral was held at St. John the Divine in New York and was attended by 12,000 people. He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx, New York.

Tomorrow … The Influence of Duke Ellington Continues To Be Felt

By Leave a Comment

Duke Ellington in the 1950s

Welcome back to our exploration of the musical career of the great Duke Ellington.

In a story that is not unfamiliar to fans of Tony Bennett, Duke Ellington found his style of music falling out of favor at beginning of the 1950s. In 1951, he saw the departure of some of his most valuable musicians from his orchestra, including Sonny Greer and Johnny Hodges. Even though he was able to keep the orchestra together, times were tough and the once-popular Ellington found himself booking one-night stands to keep going. Though he found some success in the reissues of earlier material on the “new” long-playing record albums, by 1955 the great Duke Ellington found himself without a record contract and playing background music for an ice  show in Flushing.

The summer of 1956 found Ellington invited by George Wein to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival. What happened on the evening of July 7, 1956 was a legendary performance that is still being talked about today. Duke and his orchestra had played a nicely received set, including a special composition created specifically for the festival. As the night drew towards an end — local statutes required that the music be ended by midnight — Duke Ellington announced that their next number would be an old number from 1937: Dimenuendo and Crescendo in Blue, with an “interval” by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves.

What followed was, to many (including this author), the greatest live jazz performance ever recorded. The Gonsalves interval ran for 27 choruses of virtuoso playing: 14 minutes of incredible, perfect jazz. George Avakian wrote these liner notes for the record of this performance:

Throughout the performance there were frequent bursts of wild dancing and literally acres of people stood on their chairs, cheering and clapping. There were 7,000 people there and by halfway through his solo it had become an enormous single living organism, reacting in waves like huge ripples to the music played before it.

From this concert came his most successful album ever, Ellington at Newport. Originally a single LP, there was a double-CD re-release in 1999 that also included stage announcements and other material. In fact, the track after Dimenuendo and Crescendo in Blue is labeled Announcements, Pandemonium (Live).

And here is that legendary performance:
http://open.spotify.com/track/6Rwf6zMFGJsPkg5G3aJqYx

By Leave a Comment

Duke Ellington: 1930s and 1940s

By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Duke Ellington found himself and his orchestra still playing at the Cotton Club. He had also signed a contract with Irving Mills in 1927, which proved to be beneficial as the Great Depression began to take hold. With his radio exposure as well as excellent representation by Mills, Ellington was able to survive in the worsening economy. He and his orchestra began a series of tours throughout America.

Duke Ellington was not only very popular in the United States, he had developed a significant following in the United Kingdom and Europe following tours overseas in 1933 and 1934. In addition to this popularity, he found a new appreciation from classical European composers and musicians for the quality of his longer compositions. presaging the long-form compositions he would later be known for. He had started his study of modern classical music in 1929, including Delius, Debussy and Ravel.

In the mid-1930s, the swing music landscape was full of great artists: Benny Goodman, Chick Webb, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey and many more. Swing was the new form. Ellington and his orchestra certainly could swing, but they also had a deeper, less commercial sense than straight-forward swing bands. At this time, he began to focus on jazz compositions for different sized groups and focusing on individual musicians including Johnny Hodges and Cootie Williams.

Some of Ellington’s most beloved songs were written in the 1930s, including Mood Indigo, It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing), Sophisticated Lady, Solitude, and Caravan.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn

In 1939, he formed one of his most important and long-lasting creative relationships with Billy Strayhorn, with whom he worked until Strayhorn’s death in 1967. Strayhorn had trained in classical music and he provided Ellington with an even deeper understanding of classical forms. Out this grew one of Ellington’s first longer compositions, Black, Brown and Beige from 1943.

As the war ended, new forms in jazz had started taking hold, especially the new bebop sound, as exemplified by Dizzy Gillespie. As a pre-Swing jazz performer, many thought Ellington’s music felt dated. And as the 1950s dawned, the new R&B started taking audiences away from all jazz artists. Still, Ellington was able to survive, due in large part to the royalties from his compositions and a series of one-night stands on the road.

Tomorrow … Newport 1956

And here’s a nice video of Ellington with a just bass and drums playing Take The A Train

By 6 Comments

Duke Ellington and the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was an extraordinary time of cultural and artistic growth in the African-American community and that began in 1919 and flourished until the stock market crash in 1929 and was centered in Harlem, which had become an African-American neighborhood in early 1900 during the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities, such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit. Harlem became the cultural and intellectual center of African-Americans.

Poster from the Smithsonian Institution Exhibit
Poster from the Smithsonian Institution Exhibit

The Harlem Renaissance was an explosion of arts and literature, with writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Huston, actor Paul Robeson, and intellectuals W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey all came to prominence. It was also a magnet for jazz musicians and it was during this period that the great Harlem jazz clubs were opened including the Cotton Club, the Savoy and the Apollo Theater. Jazz was the sound and the musicians from this era are still legendary: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Noble Sissie, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller, Bill Robinson, Ma Rainey, Jelly Roll Morton and, of course, Duke Ellington.

The Cotton Club

It’s no wonder that the young Duke Ellington would want to be a part of this exciting movement. He and the bad first moved to Harlem in 1919. However, they found breaking in to the Harlem jazz community more difficult than they imagined, and mostly played rent parties to support themselves. After a few months they returned to Washington, but by 1923, Ellington was making a name for himself in Harlem as well as New York City. In 1927, his band was offered a contract at the Cotton Club and Duke Ellington was the toast of the town and his weekly radio show introduced him and his music to the entire country.

Tomorrow … The Great Depression

We leave you today with one of Ellington’s great hits from 1927: Creole Love Call.

Creole Love Call

Listen to Creole Love Call on Spotify. Song · Duke Ellington · 2009

By 1 Comment

Duke Ellington: His Early Years

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April 29, 1899 in Washington, DC. His parents were James Edward Ellington and Daisy Ellington, both talented pianists. The young Ellington was raised in a middle-class African-American neighborhood of West End in DC. His father worked for the United States Navy as a blueprint technician, though some resources state that he worked as butler at the White House.

His parents started his early in life with piano lessons. Even at an early age, young Ellington was known for his good manners and being very well-dressed. In fact, the nickname Duke was given to him by a friend during his childhood. Ellington became a fan of ragtime and wrote his first ragtime song in 1914, while working as a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Cafe. As a young teen, he was sneaking into poolrooms to hear music. At this time, he began taking his piano lessons more seriously.

Ellington had also shown talent as an artist and upon graduation from high school, he had been offered a scholarship a the Pratt Institute. He turned that down, however to concentrate on his music and began playing solo piano gigs at clubs in the DC area. Supporting himself as a sign painter and a messenger, he formed his first band in 1917: The Duke’s Serenaders. They became relative popular and began playing dances and society balls in Washington and the Virginia suburbs for both African-American and white audiences.

Tomorrow: The Harlem Renaissance beckons …

Here’s one of Ellington’s earliest published songs: The East St. Louis Toodle-Oo, from 1927, by Duke Ellington and His Washingtonians

The New East St. Louis Toodle Oo

Listen to The New East St. Louis Toodle Oo on Spotify. Song · Duke Ellington · 2009