Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
Dancing with Duke No serious jazz listener would have missed a Duke Ellington concert forty or so years ago. One winter in Boston, when I was fifteen, there had been a ferocious blizzard the day...
...And the songs, almost all of them by Duke, were also known all over the world but they were looser of limb this night: "Sophisticated Lady," "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good...
...There's a set, for instance, of Walter Piston's String Quartet No...
...Still, there was so much tension in much of his music, particularly the symphonies, that he didn't seem complacent to me...
...He used to tell me how sorry he felt for those academic classical composers who might hear a piece of theirs performed two or three times in their lifetimes and for the rest of the time, it stayed lifeless in a drawer...
...5 and Quintet for Flute and String Quartet (Northeastern Records NR 208...
...But Duke heard his music, new and old, whenever he liked...
...Duke greatly enjoyed the dances...
...The promoters got their money's worth...
...But because somebody had a tape recorder, the sounds of that night are going to last many generations...
...And there were always surprises at the dances...
...When I got there, Symphony Hall was filled...
...But if truth were told, the Ellington band gave more kicks—and got more kicks itself—at dances...
...So Duke had to fill the time...
...U Choice Cuts When I was going to Northeastern University in Boston, the school was not what you'd call a fount of music...
...Duke played marvelous stride piano, along with sensuously impressionistic chordings, but he was oddly self-deprecating about his playing...
...One winter in Boston, when I was fifteen, there had been a ferocious blizzard the day Duke was scheduled for his annual appearance in Symphony Hall...
...Now, however, my old school actually has its own record label and, more to the listening point, some exceptionally appealing and challenging repertory...
...Ellington sidemen were notorious latecomers, the "starts"—the key soloists-vying with each other to be later than anybody else...
...Seeing that pleasure, the musicians wanted to give more...
...First of all, the players received immediate feedback from the dancers from the way they moved, from the smiles on their faces...
...That's why he grimaced once when I asked him when he was going to retire...
...Another delight at an Ellington dance, a delight touched with awe, was the chance to see and hear these jazz titans close-up...
...In a concert hall, you can't see anything but faceless rows...
...To what...
...Duke snapped...
...The anticipation on the faces out front, the chance to hear and tinker with his own music all night long...
...The performers are the youthful Portland String Quartet and Doriot Anthony Dwyer, who became the Boston Symphony Orchestra's first female principal player in 1952...
...It used to be said to me by the classical hipsters waiting for stray cancellations by dowagers at Friday afternoon Boston Symphony concerts in the 1940s that Johannes Brahms was the essence of bourgeois complacency...
...They just floated, and so, in response, did the women in the audience...
...I found out that the best time to hear Duke at the piano, by himself, was to get to the dance at the time it was scheduled to start...
...Duke Ellington/All Star Road Band (Doctor Jazz W2X39137, Teresa Gramophone Co., Ltd., 1414 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10019) is a rare and exhilarating find...
...Harry Carney, for instance, the immensely amiable conqueror of the huge, refractory baritone saxophone...
...Piston was a remarkably lyrical composer, but coming from Rockland, Maine, he was not the kind of fellow who wore his heart on his sleeve, or anywhere else but where it was supposed to be...
...He played so many one-nighters every year and yet, once the music started, the magic was always there for him...
...Players known all over the world grooving for Carroltown dancers on this night...
...He understands the turbulence as well as the disciplined grammar of the music...
...You can even hear him announce that the bar is going to close soon because it's almost one in the morning, but the band will play until one-thirty...
...These works, like most of his compositions, keep showing different lights and shadings every time you hear them...
...The subway was shut down, the only cars on the street were buried, and I, living clear across town, walked through the drifts, expecting to be one of a select few making up the audience that night...
...Once in a while, you could hear him wrestling with some pretty fearsome demons...
...And Johnny Hodges, the most self-assured jazz musician I have ever seen, his solos actually being the art of seduction by serenity...
...Just a dance one night way back then...
...This is Duke at a dance in June 1957, in Carroltown, Pennsylvania, a small agricultural town in the Alleghenies...
...You are-there, as Ed Murrow used to say—and Duke seems to be everywhere, exhorting the soloists like a third-base coach as the runner rounds toward home, and playing the piano more than usual...
...So the emotions are brisk, honest, sometimes somberly intense, but never sentimental...
...Johnny Hodges was there, and Harry Carney, Harold "Shorty" Baker, Paul Gonsalves, Ray Nance, Quentin Jackson...
...For a catalog of the label, write Northeastern Records, Box 116, Boston, MA 02177...
...There was a marching band for football games, with me in the clarinet section, but that was about it...
...Duke would try out a new composition, he'd let the improvisers stretch out a vintage piece of Ellingtonia, and he himself would play much more piano than he did at concerts or on records...
...He didn't mind because he figured nobody was really listening, and he did love to play the piano...
...His complete Brahms' Symphonies (Deutsche Gram-mophon 2741023)—along with the Variations on a Theme by Haydn, the Academic Festival Overture, and The Tragic Overture—are now the preferred interpretations, not only because of Bernstein's illuminating brilliance as a conductor, but also because there is much of that dualism in him...
...The recorded sound, by the way, is very live...
...One conductor who thoroughly understands what he calls "the dualism inherent in the man"—the need to keep marshaling order against the tidal waves of his passions—is Leonard Bernstein...
Vol. 48 • April 1984 • No. 4
