Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC NatHentoff An Ellington Bonanza In the early 1940s, I knew a red-bearded soldier of fortune, of indeterminate nationality, who claimed to have every single recording ever made by...
...Officials who cannot now be otherwise identified said that...
...0 Choice Cuts Pee Wee Russell, as John McDonough of Down Beat says, belonged to no one era or style of jazz: "He transcended all schools, all styles, all fads...
...And my training had been in classical music as well as jazz...
...And there's all the rest of the time...
...By the time this Duke Ellington Treasury Series has been completed, there will be forty-eight broadcasts of fifty-five minutes each...
...There are gospel performances by those three wanderers (including "Can the Circle Be Unbroken") and various solo turns and duets...
...For information on subscribing to this series of Ellington broadcasts, the man to reach is the man who put it all together— Jerry Valburn, at Meritt Record Society, P.O...
...In later years, however, I discovered there had been a lot more of Ellington preserved than on commercial records—so much that it's unlikely anyone will ever have it all...
...The real lives in his music were not only the distinctive personalities of his soloists (who were always in his head as he wrote), but also the individual and collective portraits of black life in the nation (from "A Portrait of Bert Williams" to "Harlem Air Shaft...
...I don't know where that red-bearded soldier of fortune is now, but if he's still alive, I expect he's somehow already got his hands on all forty-eight discs of Your Saturday Date with Duke, as the series was called...
...He was an eternal outsider because the only voice he ever heard was the one inside his head...
...These are radio broadcasts, made from April 7 to November 24, 1945, on the American Broadcasting Company's Blue Network...
...the war in Germany is continuing virtually on an hour-to-hour basis...
...And that voice resounds with full singularity throughout Pee Wee Russelll"The Pied Piper of Jazz" (Commodore XFL 16440, distributed by CBS Records...
...The colors he used were unknown to anyone else in or out of music...
...Concord CJ-183) is, as they used to say in jazzland, a ball...
...But like other Ellington true believers, I was grateful for whatever I could hear...
...Just two different rhythm sections...
...He's a romantic shouter, and that species is greatly endangered...
...Pianist-arranger Nat Pierce was a friend of Pee Wee, but unlike that loner, Nat's overriding affection has always been for the big band rather than the small combo...
...Having all this air time, which was unprecedented for a black jazz orchestra, Duke programmed a considerable portion of his huge repertory, going back to the 1920s and 1930s, as well as into the 1940s...
...Benny Goodman once walked into a club to hear Pee Wee, and after sitting at the bar in deep puzzlement for a set, said, "Every time Pee Wee gets into a solo, I swear he'll never be able to find a way out of it...
...With few big bands to play in any more, Nat has created one—with drummer Frankie Capp...
...Now, however, a bonanza of some of the very best Ellington has become available in first-rate pressings and with a quality of sound generally equal to studio recordings...
...And this was one of the most powerful, collectively and individually, of the Ellington orchestras...
...So anyone who had all of Ellington on record had a priceless treasure...
...That made me feel a little better, but no less covetous of what I didn't have...
...The end still might be several days away, or it could come this weekend...
...On occasion, there is also some non-musical drama, as when, on April 28,1945, the music is interrupted by a news report: "Exchanges looking to the final unconditional surrender of Germany are under way...
...Now, back to the Duke...
...In jazz, too, the word "survivor" is a term of respect, and no little wonder...
...But he always does...
...Jimmy Blanton was gone and Ben Webster was not in the reed section, but consider those who remained—Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Rex Stewart, Lawrence Brown, Tricky Sam Nanton, Ray Nance, Sonny Greer, and Junior Raglin...
...It was a Johnny Cash show, but Perkins and Lewis dropped by and the result was an entirely spontaneous tribute to themselves for having gone through all kinds of bad times, mostly of their own making, and coming out not only whole but still famous...
...Twenty-one are already available, and just to give a small measure of what this bonanza adds to high culture, the compositions include "Creole Love Call," sections of "Black, Brown and Beige" (Ellington's history of black experience in America), "Black and Tan Fantasy," "In a Mellotone," and "Harlem Air Shaft...
...It ain't easy out there on the road...
...From another hard-traveling tradition, a set that will surely be a collector's item years from now is The Survivors: Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins (Columbia FC 37961), recorded in Stuttgart, Germany, on April 23, 1981...
...Perkins has even more presence than in the past, and Cash and Jerry Lee have lost none of their snap...
...I believed him because whenever he came back home, and Duke was in the same area, Ellington would come by his house late at night to check out some composition he could barely remember having written, let alone recorded...
...Some devotees, it turned out, had recorded Ellington dances and concerts...
...The shows don't last that long...
...That's only part of the fun of listening to this album...
...The latter, a young bass player who never did achieve much renown, had a big, rich sound and a beat to match...
...INDIGENOUS MUSIC NatHentoff An Ellington Bonanza In the early 1940s, I knew a red-bearded soldier of fortune, of indeterminate nationality, who claimed to have every single recording ever made by Duke Ellington...
...Then, all manner of Ellington broadcasts began to appear...
...I greatly envied that Ellington collector...
...But he won't have them exclusively for long, and that's a comfort...
...Among the story-tellers who keep the past contemporary are alto saxophonist Marshall Royal (long with Count Basie), trumpeter Warren Luening, trombonist Buster Cooper, and singer Ernie Andrews, who ought to be much better known...
...And so nothing gets in the way of that antic imagination and those desperately and yet often exhila-ratingly lyrical sounds...
...To me, then as now, Duke was the most astonishingly protean, continually original composer I had ever heard...
...In another column, I'll look into Valburn's other jazz discoveries on his other labels...
...Crisp, infectiously swinging scores and solos with what Louis Armstrong called "plenty punch" make this a most satisfying distillation of the big jazz band tradition...
...Their Juggernaut Strikes Again...
...The clarinetist, who sounded like no one who had ever played that instrument before, has no other horns with him on these trips...
...The problem with some of these newly found marvels was that the sound, and the pressings, tended to be brittle...
...Box 156, Hicksville, NY 11802...
...Every Saturday afternoon, during those months, the Ellington orchestra was heard in this series throughout the United States and also, via Armed Forces Radio, throughout the world...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
