From 11 February, 2022, Columbia University in the City of New York presents Such Sweet Thunder: Listening Session, moderated by Professor Brent Hayes Edwards (The Literary Ellington) with Professor Courtney Bryan and Professor Nicole Mitchell...
Saturday, 12 February 2022
Sunday, 30 January 2022
Live: February 2022
Friday, February 11, 19:00 EST
Such Sweet Thunder: A Listening Session
Renowned composers and instrumentalists Courtney Bryan and Nicole Mitchell will join Professor Brent Hayes Edwards for a live listening session featuring the Duke Ellington Orchestra's 1957 recording of Such Sweet Thunder, sharing some of their favorite sections of Ellington's suite and discussing some of the innovative ways Ellington and his collaborator Billy Strayhorn orchestrated their classic "tone parallel" to Shakespeare.
Please note that though this is a public event, in accordance with Columbia University's COVID-19 protocols for public health, in-person attendance is restricted to Columbia affiliates. All other attendees can attend via the event livestream.
Location: Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive, Columbia University, Morningside Campus
Please RSVP for a link to the event livestream and instructions for in-person attendance for Columbia affiliates.
Eventbrite tickets available here.
More on Stephanie Chow here.
Friday, 18 February, 2022, 7:00pm
Guildhall Big Band with Tony Kofi: The Legacy of Harry Carney
Guildhall Big Band and their director, Matt Skelton, are joined by special guest Tony Kofi to celebrate the legacy of baritone saxophone player Harry Carney, who spent over four decades as a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Renowned saxophonist Tony Kofi joins the band on the baritone sax chair in a performance featuring repertoire from Duke Ellington’s legendary 1946 Carnegie Hall concert.
The Guildhall is indebted to Peter Long for his expert guidance and knowledge of this material and in preparing the band for this performance.
Details here.
Tuesday, 25 January 2022
Live: January 2022
15 January -23 January, 2022
Symphonic Ellington
The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at The Walt Disney Concert Hall, Hollywood Bowl
Programme details here.
26 January, 2022
Black, Brown and Beige and Sacred Music
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
with Audra McDonald, The Jazz Orchestra at Dr Phillips Center
Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Bethune-Cookman University Concert Chorale
Jazz is America’s music—and Duke Ellington was its number one creator. His work
Black, Brown and Beige is an American masterpiece that set out to broaden a person’s—and a country’s—sense of history. Critics panned its premiere in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1943, simply because it was ahead of its time.
Now, 80 years later, special guest Audra McDonald will join The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, along with members of The Jazz Orchestra at Dr. Phillips Center, players from Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Bethune-Cookman University Concert Chorale to honor Ellington’s most significant work. This monumental evening will feature the professional world premiere of the orchestration of Black, Brown and Beige created at Ellington’s request.
Seats will fill up fast. Get tickets now for the performance of a lifetime—as Steinmetz Hall continues to take its place as one of the world’s most important concert halls.
27 January, 2022, 3:00PM (EST)
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a Black King of the Bible in Duke Ellington’s
Symphonic Triptych Three Black Kings
Luca Bragalini will discuss Martin Luther King’s musical depiction in Three Black Kings, with an analysis of the implications of the Black King’s imagery in art history, political thought, and the importance that religion has had for the African American community.
Tickets available here.
Monday, 31 January 2022
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Duke Ellington Orchestra directed by Jeremy Price
Afro Bossa
Saturday, 8 January 2022
Super Stacks
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Photograph enhanced digitally by Jack Chambers |
The second issue of the newsletter Tone Parallel, courtesy of the publishing platform Substack, is available to subscribers now.
Here is the opening of this edition...
The Kodacolor snapshot above, bleached now by the passing years, was taken on 29 May 1970.
The occasion was to commemorate the dedication of the new Alvar Aalto Library at Mount Angel Abbey, a Benedictine community, some forty miles south of Portland in Oregon.
The photograph was the property of the young woman standing to the right of Duke Ellington. Her name is Ann Henry.
According to the website Second Hand Songs, Ann Henry was a singer, dancer, choreographer, impressionist and comedienne from Chicago who was billed as “the female Sammy Davis Jr.”
A decade before the commemoration of the Abbey library, Ann Henry’s career was in full swing. Her big break came in 1952 when she replaced Eartha Kitt in the musical revue New Faces. Her most successful recording would seem to be a single of Like Young, the André Previn composition to which Paul Francis Webster (lyricist for Ellington’s Jump For Joy) set words. In 1958, at the age of twenty-five, she travelled to London to appear in a musical presentation for Granada Television entitled On The Air. Whilst readying a concert tour for which she had been composing her own music in 1963, she was stricken by spinal meningitis which effectively ended her professional career as an entertainer.
While she almost lost her life to the illness, Ann Henry did make something of a remarkable recovery, regaining her mobility to an extent and moving about using a pair of cane walking sticks (and, indeed, managing to continue something of her recording career, at least: in November 1964, she was on backing vocals for Dizzy Gillespie’s album Jambo Caribe).
Having already begun to write music herself, as she recovered, Miss Henry took up the post of composer-in-residence at Mount Angel Abbey. She had exchanged the bright lights of Las Vegas for a narrow, soundproof converted storeroom in a small guesthouse at the monastery. It was from there that she composed the work Pockets: It’s Amazing When Love Goes On Parade which was created to celebrate the commemoration of Mount Angel Abbey library and was given its première by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, arranged by Ron Collier and featuring Ann Henry for that occasion.
To subscribe, go here.
Monday, 27 December 2021
Gentleman's Relish?
A curio listed as a recent lot on a certain Internet auction house. The vendor has included several snaps which allow us a peek behind the magic curtain in the era of white-walled car tyres, fedoras, suburban easy listening and 'Hi, honey, I'm home'. Whilst relatively innocent in the 1950s, the encouragement provided by these pictorial papers to chase bunny girls will take the pursuer down a rabbit hole and into some very dark corners from which they are unlikely yet to have been able to emerge.
The objectification of women is a topic beyond the scope of this blog so suffice it to say, it is the picture of Duke Ellington which draws the eye here and is new to me, I must admit. Duke gets top billing in an article which the vendor's photographs allow us to read in full. Since the asking price of the publication is $99, I'm grateful to have been spared the cost of buying the original in order to read it.
The article, entitled Playboy's All-Time All-Star Jazz Band by one Jack Tracy offers some interesting contemporary perspective on the history of jazz and its stars and one particularly poignant line, that Charlie parker "died of a heart attack while this article was being prepared."
The writer's assignment is to assemble an all star aggregation, built around the instrumentation of a big band (a somewhat passé form itself in terms of contemporary jazz in 1955 I would have said). Needless to say, Duke is appointed the (titular?) leader of this speculative orchestra. Call it the big band theory?
It is interesting to reflect that were Ellington to command such an organisation of star-crossed players, would it have been any more sublime than the actual Duke Ellington orchestra we got in its evolving iterations over half a century? I think not. The Duke Ellington Orchestra at any point in its history was as unique as a fingerprint. And as irreplaceable.
Click on the images to enlarge and to read the original piece...
Friday, 17 December 2021
Bringing Home The Bacon
Photographs of a couple of newspaper clippings for sale recently on eBay tell the interesting story of Louis bacon's travails on the continent of Europe as war clouds continued gather throughout 1939. I thought the clippings and a write-up of the text, were interesting to post here.
Bacon played in the Ellington Orchestra for about a year from 1933 to 1934 returning, according to Tom Lord's discography, for a one-off date with a group led by Rex Stewart on 20 March, 1939. bacon's brush with fascism was perhaps not too dissimilar from Ellington's own. The Ellington band toured continental Europe not too long after this small group date. As Thomas Cunniffe recounts in his review of Riding on Duke's Train by Mick Carlon, "... the orchestra did not schedule any concerts in Germany, but they were forced to travel through that country to get to their gigs in Sweden. The orchestra's train was held by the Gestapo for several hours in Hamburg beforebeing allowed to pass through."
From Downbeat, Autumn, 1939:
Chicago – Ivie Anderson, singer with Duke Ellington’s band, was in a gay mood during the band’s Sherman Hotel engagement here. After waiting in vain for news of her husband, Louis Bacon, the trumpet player, she received two letters from him in which he said all was well and that he was ready to return to the United States.
Bacon, a former horn artist with Ellington, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong and Benny Carter, left Carter’s band in July of 1939and went to Europe, where he played with Willie Lewis’ band in Holland. According to Ivie, Louis worked up until May 10 of this year, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in a brutal blitzkrieg which destroyed Rotterdam and damaged other cities. Then for months Ivie had no word from her husband until two weeks ago. His letters were dated July 19 and August 16.
“Louis wants to come home,” said Ivie, “but he can’t find a w ay to get here. He says he has only worked tow or three days since the Nazis took over Holland. His letters were mailed from The Hague.”
Ivie and Bacon were married in 1934 shortly after he joined the Ellington band. Ivie has been sending him money since the invasion and believes he will get transportation home before Thanksgiving.
Wednesday, 15 December 2021
Sacré Blues
Somebody really (reely?) wanted a rare tape recording of a performance of The Second Sacred Concert on 1 October 1972 at The Presbyterian Church of Madison NJ on 1 ). In the early hours of yesterday morning (2:00am UK time), it sold for a hefty $570.00...
The Presbyterian Church of Madison N.J. in Celebration Duke Ellinton & his Orch in 225th Anniversary sacred concert October 1,1972 Drew University live reel to reel tape with Program.
Speed:7 1/2” feet : 1800 FT -Low Noise .two track .(vintage tape )
This is a live tape of the 2nd out of 3 performances of this controversial monumental and historical piece .
Condition : very good vintage condition. sounds great .come with program.
All details see photos .
On Dec-08-21 at 06:23:32 PST, seller added the following information:
P.S. The manufacturer of tape and box is different. The manufacturer of tape is Reeves Soundcraft.
I'm sure anyone prepared to pay that sort of price will look after the tape and we can only hope one day the contents find their way into the public domain - perhaps with a legitimate official release?
For the record, here are the images of the tape and the copy of the programme for the concert which was also included in the lot. A copy of the programme at least is lodged in the Ellington Collection at The Smithsonian. As for the contents of the tape, we can only live in faith, hope and charity... the greatest of these, on this occasion, being hope...
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