One never knows, do one? to quote Fats Waller, where one's explorations may lead?
In our golden anniversary celebration of Duke Ellington in the seventies, we reach 9 July today. On this day in 1970, Ellington and the Orchestra were in the Rhenus Studio in Köln, West Germany. For Ellington, it was just another stopover and a recording session for his private 'stockpile'. The engineer on this occasion, however, was Conny Plank and the 'discovery' of the tracks laid down that day created quite a media storm when they were copied to CD for release in 2015. You can read my earlier posts on the release of this disc here.
Quite the most intriguing aspect of this session was not so much the Kraftwerk engineer Conny Plank, but the presence of a vocalist Ellington seems to have acquired on his travels, Lena Junoff, pictured here with Maestro...
I am still trying to track down a copy of her autobiography/ cookbook (!), primadonnan från Hisingen. Some indication of its contents are in this post, Off The Wall, here.
Miss Junoff is still pursuing her singing career, it seems, and I discovered the following video of her group called Cosmic Ellington Girls which I post here as a remarkable post script to the story of Ellington's Köln recording date...
An altogether more sober assessment of the relative musical merits of the so-called Conny Plank Session may be found at Michael Leddy's excellent blog Orange Crate Art.
Thanks for the shout-out, Ian. I will add Lena Junoff's name to my review. I don't know how I missed it in your earlier post.
ReplyDeleteOh, wait — I had her name in there all along. [Slaps head.]
ReplyDelete