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| Duke Ellington receives a special pre-concert gift from NIU First Lady Shirley Nelson, a medallion “from his friends and admirers at Northern Illinois University.” |
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T. S. Eliot Four Quartets
March, 2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Duke Ellington’s final public appearances.
People always wanted to make Duke Ellington their own. So, in De Kalb, Illinois, on 21 April, 1980, a plaque was erected in the Holmes Student Center Ballroom of Northern Illinois University – which some five years earlier had been named The Duke Ellington Ballroom – to commemorate the Orchestra’s appearance on the evening of 20 March, 1974.
The Northern Illinois University website reported the evening’s concert as follows:
"Edward Kennedy Ellington, better known as Duke, played the last full concert of his 75-year life as the highlight of NIU’s 75th anniversary celebration in 1974. Battling both lung cancer and pneumonia, Ellington and his jazz orchestra nonetheless delighted a capacity crowd in the University Center (now HSC) ballroom on March 20, 1974.”Edward Kennedy Ellington, better known as Duke, played the last full concert of his 75-year life as the highlight of NIU’s 75th anniversary celebration in 1974. Battling both lung cancer and pneumonia, Ellington and his jazz orchestra nonetheless delighted a capacity crowd in the University Center (now HSC) ballroom on March 20, 1974.
“The characteristics of Ellington’s style were evident that night,” wrote Northern Star reporter Carol Fouke.
“Old favourites and new pieces manifested vigour, elegance, sophistication and an interweaving of solo and group portions of the numbers. The fun, wit and rapport with the audience introduced Ellington and his ‘cats in the band’ not only as great performers but also as persons with a bit of mischief in them,” Fouke wrote.
"Ellington’s song book contained an impressive amount of classic jazz, including some of his own compositions such as Take the ‘A’ Train, It Don’t Mean a Thing (If it Ain’t Got That Swing), Mood Indigo and dozens more that have become jazz standards.
"One of the hallmarks of the Ellington orchestra was the use of plunger mutes on brass instruments, which gives trumpets and trombones elements of the human singing voice.
"The plungers were much in evidence during the NIU performance, especially during the solo parts played by guest trumpeter Cootie Williams, a jump blues musician from Alabama who is said to have influenced present-day trumpet star Wynton Marsalis."
In a 1998 tribute to Ellington, Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich relayed a story about that evening told to him by former NIU jazz director Ron Modell.
“' I went into his hotel room before the concert, and tried not to show my shock at how he looked,” Modell said. “He was sitting on the bed slumped over, but he got up to greet me. When I went to my seat, I told my wife there was no way he was going to be able to perform a concert that night. And yet, when he hit the stage, he looked like there was nothing in the world wrong with him. He sounded great at the piano, the band was great, and his banter was as good as it ever was.'
"Duke Ellington never played another concert, and died just two months after his DeKalb performance. Three months later, Chicago’s jazz community organised a Grant Park tribute to Ellington that eventually became the legendary Chicago Jazz Festival.
"Six years later, NIU honoured the late musical icon during a repeat appearance of his orchestra, this time led by his son, Mercer. From that day forward, the venue where Edward Kennedy Ellington played his last concert would be called the Duke Ellington Ballroom.
"Duke Ellington played his last concert in the Holmes Student Center ballroom. On the first anniversary of his death, the Duke Ellington jazz orchestra, led by his son, Mercer, made a repeat performance. Observers recall a palpable energy in the room, with audiences members on their feet “clapping and hollering.” The band noticed it too, and at the end of concert, when presented with the plaque naming the venue for his father, Mercer Ellington, his band and the audience reportedly “shed more than a few tears.”
There ought to be a plaque at every place Duke Ellington and his Orchestra performed.
The belief that the Orchestra’s appearance on 20 March 1974 was “the final full performance by ‘Duke’ Ellington and his Orchestra” is, however, mistaken.
It is true to say though that the very last known recording of Duke Ellington leading the Orchestra was made at this date – Take The ‘A’ Train, appropriately enough, being the only number from the performance surviving.
It was through the work of DEMS that the true date of Duke Ellington’s final public appearance was confirmed. In the first edition of the Bulletin for 1990, one of the luminaries of the Society, Gordon Ewing, wrote:
“Many people believe that the last public appearance of Duke occurred on 20 March 1974 at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb. In fact there is a room, in the Student Center, called the “Duke Ellington Ballroom” and there is a plaque just outside that room declaring that this was the site of Duke’s last performance. However no one seems to have read (the book Duke Ellington In Person by Mercer Ellington with Stanley Dance) which in this case correctly states that Duke last played two concerts on 22 March 1974 in Sturgis, Michigan. Mercer refers to the auditorium as a “firehouse” kind of place. Actually it is a very fine building. I drove over to Sturgis several months ago, met the present manager and talked to an Ed Smoker, who worked backstage and remembers having to provide a cot for Duke in his dressing room and bringing him a six-pack of Coke. There were two concerts, at 7 and 9 pm. I am going ahead with a plan to have a plaque placed on this building, a project to which the Board of the Auditorium agrees enthusiastically.”
“We played one more date, two concerts in a kind of firehouse in Sturgis, I think it was. People said it was cruel to push him like that, to have him do two shows, but the second show was actually better than the first because he seemed to summon up more energy. When we left there, I went on with the band to Kalamazoo, where we had another date, but he checked into a hotel in Sturgis. It was a shame that they put him into a second floor room, for then he had to climb the steps. In Kalamazoo, before the concert, I learned he had turned back and gone to the Detroit airport from Sturgis. [….] He didn’t go straight into the hospital — they told him they were not prepared to do too much for him at that particular time — but I think they really wanted to give him the benefit of a couple of days at home to rest.”
In fact, an article about the engagement at the Sturges-Young auditorium appeared at the time.
Under the title “The Duke’s Last Gig: A legend says ‘So Long’ in Sturgis Michigan”, the reporter, Les Alrey, wrote:
"On March 22, 1974, one month before his 75th birthday, Duke Ellington had a concert date to fill because of a cancellation, and Sturgis, Michigan, had an empty auditorium. So the Duke came to Sturgis, population 9295 for his last gig. But no one knew it at the time.
"Carl Alken, who manages the auditorium in the city just north of Indiana in St. Joseph County, was instructed to have a couch ready backstage, and a six-pack of Coke for the jazz-man who had sworn off hard liqour years before.
"‘When I saw him after the performance, he was a tired old man,’ Alken said. ‘He looked like he’d been run through a wringer. But he was still gracious, a real gentleman of the old school.’
"Duke Ellington, who had played his music on every continent, snapped his lithe fingers on the time for Take the ‘A’ Train, Mood Indigo, Satin Doll and Caravan.
"Then after the 20 piece band had played a half-hour encore, the leader came out alone to the piano, and played Lotus Blossom, a Billy Strayhorn composition that floats like soft wind and water, to a hushed audience.
"Afterwards, a girl who played trumpet in the high school band, asked for Duke’s autograph. As he gave it, he mischievously probed and found her musical interests. ‘Well then,’ he jived, ‘pack your bags and come along.’”
In 2006, Linda Winkens, Vice-President of the Sturgis Historical Society, wrote to the Duke Ellington Music Society and said:
“Duke Ellington gave his last performance at the Sturgis-Young Auditorium in our town, Sturgis Michigan and years ago someone said that they were going to put up a plaque there. According to your web site is that someone you? To the best of my knowledge this never happened and we would be honored to have this, as a valued part of our local history on display in the Sturgis-Young Auditorium and Civic Center. Please contact me.”
Sjef Hoefsmit replied:
“You are right. Duke Ellington was on stage for the last time in Sturgis at the City Auditorium where he played two concerts on 22Mar74. Recordings of these concerts have never been found.
“I think I know who came forward with the proposal to put a plaque at the spot. It was Gordon Ewing, who was quite upset about the fact that it was claimed that Duke was on stage for the last time at the Kalb University.”
The plaque was eventually funded as a joint project between the Sturgis Historical Society and Duke Ellington Music Society. A dedication ceremony for the historical marker was held on 9 October, 2009.
“What a pity my dear friend Gordon Ewing couldn’t see this,” Sjef wrote.
The plaque reads:
The Sturges-Young Auditorium opened in 1955 to fanfare and celebration. The 986-seat multipurpose facility was much larger than would be expected for a small community like Sturgis. Spurred by private donations, the city began construction on the building in 1954. Fort Wayne architect A.M. Strauss provided the Modernist design. Major contributors included the building’s namesakes Clara and Stella Sturges and Emma Young, each of whom stipulated in their wills that funds be used for the construction of a civic auditorium. The venue has hosted many famous musicians, comedians, and public figures. On March 22, 1974, bandleader Duke Ellington (1899-1974) give his final performance here, two months before he died.
“One week later, Duke Ellington checked into Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. When he died on 24 May, he was suffering from cancer of both lungs and pneumonia.”
The story far from ends here, however. Duke Ellington’s final public appearance was on 22 March, 1974.
Following his appearance at the Sturges-Young Auditorium on 22 March 1974, Duke Ellington returned home, via Detroit, to New York, resting for two days before being admitted to the Harkness Pavilion of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
The Orchestra was booked to appear at Central Michigan University on the evening following, 23 March, however.
Teaching at Central Michigan University at that time was pianist, composer and respected educator Joan Wildman. Just hours before the concert at CMU was scheduled to start, Joan was contacted by Mercer Ellington. He asked if she would be willing to fill in for Duke. As she told Kurt Dietrich for his book Wisconsin Riffs, “I said I would love to do it. And being the… very innocent naïve person I was back then, the only question I had was, ‘What should I wear?’ “ The piano player himself needed no written music, of course, so there was no printed music for Joan to read. “So the bass player’s (presumably Woolf Freedman) standing right next to me, (telling me) what tune and what key.”
Despite the absence of Duke and the audience’s disappointment of not hearing him play, their performance that night was greeted with a standing ovation.
How fascinating to discover – and to celebrate – the woman who was the first to step into that breach.
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Born in Nebraska on New Year’s Day, 1938, Joan Wildman started playing the piano by ear from an early age. At seventeen, she was playing jazz in a local nightclub six nights a week, completing later a degree in classical music. “And so in that regard,” she has said, “I guess I was more focused on the classical part than on the jazz part. But the jazz part was always there.” Wildman has referred to the evening when she played with the Duke Ellington Orchestra as a “spurring-me-on kind of thing.”
In an amazing synchronism, given that it was Woolf Freedman with whom she played in the orchestra and who had appeared on electric bass on Ellington’s 1972 recording of The UWIS Suite, eventually, her career took Joan to University of Wisconsin-Madison where she helped to build the school’s jazz programme, founded the Music Collective, wrote essays such as The Function of the Left Hand in the Evolution of Jazz Piano and collaborated with fellow professor Roscoe Mitchell on his Four Compositions and Numbers.
The potential category defying ‘fusion’ of classical and jazz playing must have made Joan Wildman the perfect fit for the orchestra. On attending a performance of her music in 2015, a reviewer wrote, “Challenging, stimulating, and humorous, the music of Joan Wildman combines influences across the spectrum of jazz in diverse and fascinating ways; elements of stride piano can be heard along side angular Monkish lines and free contrapuntal improvisations are juxtaposed with unison melodies reminiscent of Gregorian Chant.”
Of a performance at the UWIS Art Museum he attended one Sunday afternoon in the 1980s, Dean Robins wrote for the website Wisconsin Life, “Little did I realize that Joan Wildman was about to blow up time and space.
“She attacked a DX7 synthesizer, calling forth unearthly sounds. The constantly morphing tones and textures went beyond normal categories of beauty and ugliness. The compositions alternated between elegantly written sections and startling free-form improvisation.
“With its solos, its rhythmic momentum, and its nods to the blues, this was clearly jazz of some sort. But its unique brilliance made labels meaningless. I don’t know about the rest of the Sunday afternoon audience, but I staggered out of the art museum wondering what had just hit me.
“I had to find out who this woman was. Did she come from arty Greenwich Village, the daughter of an avant-garde classical composer and a boogie-woogie pianist?
“No, not by a long shot. Joan Wildman grew up on a Nebraska ranch, isolated from urban culture. She took piano lessons from a small-town teacher who despised contemporary music.
“Then, 12-year-old Joan began picking up a radio station from faraway Little Rock, Arkansas. For the first time, she heard blues and gospel, and she felt this language in her bones. There followed one musical discovery after another, from Charlie Parker’s bebop to John Cage’s modernist experiments.
“In college Wildman had to choose between classical music and jazz. Anyone might have guessed the outcome, given her deep devotion to improvisation. This is a woman who would sooner go into another line of work than play a composition the same way twice. She’s all about expressing herself spontaneously and touching listeners in the moment. For her, jazz improvising isn’t just a musical approach—it’s a way of life.”
Improvising remained her way of life until Joan Wildman died on 8 April, 2020.
One of the best – if not the best – video recordings we have of Duke Ellington himself was aped for ORTF, Paris on 2 July 1970. Alone at the piano in the television studio, Ellington plays some of his most famous compositions and reminisces to camera about his career. On the subject of jazz, he says:
Jazz is a tree and it has many, many branches that reach out into many directions. Of course it goes into the Far East and picks up an exotic blossom. At the end of each branch is a twig and at the end of each twig there are many different shaped leaves and many vari-coloured flowers and it goes east, west, north, south and everywhere. These blue-blooded black roots are deep in the soil of black Africa which of course is the foundation of everything that is with the beat the beat that of course today is the most listened to in the world.
And Duke Ellington’s music, the food of love, plays on. It branches everywhere.
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Here is what I believe must be one of the last (if not the last) photographs of Duke Ellington: 22 March 1974, Sturgis, Michigan, Duke Ellington takes his last bow…
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