It’s a quality of
great music, I suppose, that it can conjure a nostalgia for times lost quite
outside the music itself. If I listen to something by Glenn Miller, I can
remember quite distinctly what it was like to be seventeen – but that’s because
I was listening to Glenn Miller’s music when I was that age. The music, in a
sense, cannot transcend the times in which I first encountered it, its
principal interest to me now, purely nostalgic.
Ellington’s music,
in contrast, takes me back to all sorts of corners of my memory despite the
fact I wasn’t listening to Ellington’s music – wasn’t even aware of him,
perhaps – in that time. This is truly great music which exists in, of, for, outside
and beyond itself.
That’s one thought
prompted by this luminous recording from 1935.
Secondly, the
claims made for the music by Simon Carmiggelt, lost -I don’t doubt to an extent – in translation
are, nevertheless, particularly germane. Carmiggelt says
“It’s a remarkable
epic kind of music. It’s telling and afterwards – when the music is over – you
can actually tell anything about it, it fits everything. Indeed, it seems that
Ellington was and still is a great man, since the music has remained as strong
as steel all these years.”
And the third
point is this: that Ellington’s response to the times in which he lived, the
injustice and indignity frequently visited upon black Americans, was gracious,
beautiful works such as this is remarkable. And one wonders the extent to which
in those lost times, as he listened to this piece, one of the things that
‘fits’ is Simon Carmiggelt’s memory of his brother...
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