Ellington Playing the Band

...I'm Checkin' Out, Go'om Bye" is "Barney Goin' Easy" with a jazzy lyric added...

...Brown and Beige...

...He simply had to keep producing to keep what he referred to as "these very expensive gentlemen" well supplied with new music...

...Just as delightful are some of the swing era standards and crazy pop songs that are here given the Ellington treatment— including "Rose of the Rio Grande," "A Blues Serenade," "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street," and even that 1938 dance craze from England, "The Lambeth Walk...

...By contrast, Duke Ellington 1939 (Smithsonian Collection R010) contains only one of his standards, "Sophisticated Lady...

...Even so, he was not above borrowing from himself...

...Few of these long pieces survived, even in part, in the repertoire of the Ellington band—really only the "Blues" movement of his Black...

...The Juilliard-educated Mercer explains: "The greater part of his knowledge was self-taught, by ear, and gradually acquired later by reading and application...

...The majority of them were intended as racial statements of one kind or another...

...The rest of the material, all composed by Duke, is unfamiliar—a lot of it, in fact, never before released on LP, and some of it never issued in America...

...If nothing else, these albums prove Ellington was right: His instrument really was the orchestra...

...He could sit down and do anything he wanted to do...

...Way Low" is simply a slight alteration of his old instrumental from the 1920s, "The Mooche...

...It is too personal and specific to carry messages...

...His technique for the most part is rather stiff and pianistic, especially alongside the incredibly fluent Coltrane...

...Moreover, he pioneered the more ambitious long compositions in jazz, reaching out toward classical forms...

...But during the last years before his death in 1976, he returned to doing his own solo improvisation—perhaps to prove himself...

...In a duet with Ray Brown, an excellent bassist with whom he had never before played, he cut This One's for Blanton, a tribute to his brilliant young bassist-protege, Jimmy Blanton, who died in 1942 at the age of 24...

...Mercer tells us that Duke's serious compositions were a way of reconciling his ambivalent attitude toward jazz...

...Since he liked being the leader, he decided that if he was not to be a soloist, he would make the band itself his instrument...

...The peculiar nature of his talent made him dependent on them...

...Duke's playing on those two discs shows traces of the old stride style, but none of the humor and lightness and feeling of freedom that stride could generate...

...He continued this practice througout his career as a songwriter: One of his biggest hits, "Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me" was a vocal version of "Concerto for Cootie...

...On the one hand, Ellington wished to see the music elevated to a more dignified status: "He objected to the term 'jazz' because in the early days it related to sex and was used by the lowest elements, the people in brothels, to identify music linked with orgies...

...During most of his 55 years of writing and leading Duke played so little—an introduction here, a fillip there—that his was virtually an orchestra without a piano: He would thunder out the opening bars of, say, "Things Ain't What They Used To Be," then jump from his piano and lead his musicians through their paces, giving cues when and if necessary, calling out extra choruses, generally keeping things under control...

...In this way, Duke was truly playing his band, taking advantage of what each member had to offer, and not merely using it in sections as brass and reed choirs that were supported by rhythm...

...Consequently, it takes a little listening time to get used to the 32 tracks on this set, but then they prove a treasure trove of vintage Ellingtonia...

...The first, Duke Ellington 1938 (Smithsonian Collection R003) is rich with familiar and unfamiliar material...

...Hence Ellington's combination of "serious" and improvisation, with the accent on the latter...

...It is therefore both fascinating and a little dismaying to see what he kept hidden for so long and so well suddenly made very public indeed in a new biography by none other than Mercer Ellington, his son...

...I would, however, like to call attention to two albums that are not in Schwann because they are not available in record stores...

...implied adhering to the rules and lack of creativity...

...Indeed, as early as 1928 his Creole Rhapsody became the first jazz composition (forget Rhapsody in Blue) to take up both sides of a 78 rpm record...

...As far as his vast black and white public knew, the black bandleader was folded up and put away in a box after each performance...

...Yet interesting as this may be—and I won't pretend otherwise—it is Ellington the musician that concerns us above all...

...He next moved on to writing in a kind of concerto form, where various members of the band were featured in single pieces penned to show off their skills in solo improvisation...

...Duke was to find, though, that it was not really suitable to the band he took from his home in Washington, D.C., to New York...

...While Ellington was amazingly prolific throughout his life—his son tells us it was not uncommon for him to write two or three new songs and arrange them the night before a recording session—his musical imagination was at its most fertile during this period...

...Elmer Snowden on banjo and drummer Sonny Greer rendered his thumping superfluous, and the horns tended to drown out his ivory tickling...

...It's nice to know the Duke didn't always take himself so seriously...

...He would play jazz on it as truly and as well as Waller played the piano, Armstrong the trumpet, Jimmy Noone the clarinet...

...That is not to take anything away from the Duke, nor to deny his genius —and make no mistake: He was a genius (Mozart stole from himself, too...

...Among the album's 32 cuts are Ellington standards like "Boy Meets Horn," the beautiful "Prelude to a Kiss," "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart," and "The New Black and Tan Fantasy," as well as the equally fine "Lost in Meditation" and "Pyramid" (both featuring Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol), "The Gal from Joe's" (with one of alto saxophonist Johnny Hodge's finest solos on record), and "The Stevedore's Serenade" (with Barney Bigard at his liquid best...

...Although there are many more instrumentals than vocal numbers on the album, singer Ivie Anderson never sounded better than she does here on "A Lonely Co-Ed" and "Killin' Myself"—two pop songs by Duke that never became very popular with the public...

...Each is worthy of special note because it contains the music of Ellington and his orchestra when they were at their very best—if an organization that was good as long as this one could be said to have had a golden era, the period was 1938-42, and the Smithsonian has reissued nearly all their work from those five years in a series of two-record sets...

...And here his son provides information and observations quite as startling as the juiciest gossip...

...He didn't like the rules in anything...

...It was the challenge of conducting and composing for his group that drove Duke to finally learn to read music...

...here is no shortage of Ellington recordings...

...it is simply his orchestral approach translated from the short breaks and color passages he created for himself into a series of long, too-carefully constructed solos...

...Duke's songs—"Sophisticated Lady," "ItDon't MeanaThing," "IGot It Bad," "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart," to mention just a few—were to enrich popular music immeasurably in the '30s and '40s...

...The titles tell the story: The Deep South Suite, New World a-Comin', The Liberian Suite, Harlem...

...So far as learning to read music was concerned, he was never exactly avid, although it was just a matter of applying himself...

...Perhaps the most surprising item is that at the beginning of his career the man who has gradually come to be recognized as one of the greatest American composers could not even read music...

...He was a collaborative artist, a man who both led and served one of the finest collections of musicians ever assembled, and nobody could play them but the Duke...

...Ellington was soon devoting increasing attention to long, serious compositions and less to song writing...

...Most critics disapproved, and I think they were right...

...T .JL...

...He collaborated with John Coltrane on Ellington and Coltrane, achieving consistently interesting, if not always totally successful results...

...The handicap was not severe at the time, for his earliest ambition was to be a piano soloist and his models were those princes of the Harlem rent parties, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Willie "The Lion" Smith...

...I doubt that jazz can work when it is enlisted for such enterprises, no matter how worthy...

...Stride worked especially well for keyboard entertainers such as Waller, who often played without benefit of a rhythm backup and sang to their own accompaniment...

...To discard a rule was a source of inspiration to him because he immediately saw the way to make it work in reverse...

...A look in the Schwann catalogue will reveal just about the most complete listing under his name of any jazz artist...

...Thus "Echoes of Harlem" was written for trumpeter Cootie Williams, "Clarinet Lament" for Barry Bigard and "Boy Meets Horn" for coronetist Rex Stewart...

...Duke Ellington in Person (Houghton Mifflin, 236 pp., $10.95), written in collaboration with the English jazz critic Stanley Dance, is jam-packed with the sort of revelations that send people to People magazine—whom Duke lived with, where, when, etc...

...After all, it must mean something that Ellington took his inspiration for the most successful attempt in this vein, Such Sweet Thunder, from the plays of William Shakespeare...

...On the other hand, he felt that any sort of strictly classical approach to the music was wrong, for to him "formal training...

...The three comprised the distinguished faculty of the "stride" school of jazz piano, which pits a resolutely and rhythmically comping left hand against a right hand gone silly as it tickles away cutely at the melody...