One Night Stand

Had you been present at The Royal Festival Hall on the night of 15 February, 1964,for the first night of the Ellington band's you  would have witnessed - and for one night only - the sight of sound of Tubby Hayes in the saxophone section. He had been called in to deputise for the absent Paul Gonsalves.

The evening has long captured my imagination in part, because, this is the only occasion - I think - when a British musician appeared in the Ellington line-up and Tubby himself cuts a romantic figure in jazz.

I've posted elsewhere about this evening (here)but I am reminded of the occasion because early next year sees the long-awaited publication of Simon Spillett's biography of Tubby: The Long Shadow of the Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes Simon is an acknowledged expert on Tubby's career. The Jazzscript essay here gives you a taste of the biography. It is to be published by Equinox Publishing on 25 March, 2015.

Until then, Simon is a guiding light on the All About Jazz forum's discussion thread, For All Tubby Hayes Fans which is well worth a visit.

Here's some additional information on the date from Ken Vail's Duke's Diary.

Distingué Traces...

Here are three images I found recently of the only record produced on the Clover Label which was part owned by Duke Ellington and the Newport heiress Doris Duke. It's Joe Castro's third date as leader for the album Lush Life. For the full story, click through to a post from 2011, Sketches of Mex.

Scene and unseen...

College de Bernardins, 6 June 2011

Encore!

Doug Ramsay on Gerald Wilson

Following the death of Gerald Wilson on 8 September, Doug Ramsay posted an excellent piece on his Rifftides blog about Wilson's piece El Viti, one of sixteen charts the composer/arranger offered Ellington and which Duke featured during his engagement at La Côte d'Azur in 1966.

Doug writes:

"When I was working on the essay that accompanies the Mosaic box set of his Pacific Jazz recordings, Mr. Wilson and I discussed his development of eight-part harmony. He applied it to the piece he  wrote in honor of the Spanish bullfighter Santiago Martín, known as El Viti (born in 1938).

“El Viti was a great matador,” Gerald says, “different from any other I ever saw. He never smiled, and he was tough. I tried to trace a picture of him, as it gets down into a unique part where his stuff in the ring would get wild but not overbearing. It was a place for me to use my eight-part harmony. You’ll hear the brass playing it, with two different times going at once. You know, I invented eight-part harmony.”

Here, the muted trumpet is by Wilson, the only instance of his playing with his band on a recording. Anthony Ortega is the alto saxophone soloist.

Again, from the Mosaic notes:

Multi-part harmony in modern classical music starts with Debussy and Ravel and reaches monumental proportions in Bartok, Stravinsky, Ives and Scriabin. I asked the composer and orchestrator Jeff Sultanoff about the use of eight-part harmony in jazz, and about Wilson’s role in it.

“As Gerald defines it,” Sultanof said, “it means that in an eight-part brass section, all parts are different, no doubling octaves and such. He was probably the first to do this, although other arrangers had tried similar things. I can think of Pete Rugolo as an immediate example, but he did not start doing it until about 1946, whereas Gerald claims he was doing it as early as 1945. I can also think of Ellington and Strayhorn who did not voice ensembles in the ‘standard’ way. There are isolated examples of it in Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan’s work, but I don’t recall anyone doing it on a regular basis before Gerald.”

In 1966 Duke Ellington recorded Wilson’s arrangement of “El Viti,” also known in the Ellington book as “The Matador,” in the Verve album of Côte d’Azur Concerts."

Read the whole post here.

La Dolce Vita

I recently discovered, via Spotify, a recording of a Duke Ellington performance which has not been made available before. 

My best guess is that the recording is taken from Duke Ellington's appearance at XIV FESTIVAL INTERNAZIONALE DEL JAZZ which took place in Bolgogna, Italy in 1973 whilst Ellington was on his final European tour.

The festival continues, annually, to this day and the website  says:

Nei giorni 8-9-10 novembre 1973 si tenne il XIV Festival Internazionale del Jazz che presentò interessanti gruppi di giovani: uno italiano, la Big Band degli allievi del Conservatorio di Bologna diretta da Ettore Ballotta, l’altro americano, “The Young Giants of Jazz” con Jimmy Owens, Gary Burton, Cedar Walton e Roy Haynes. Furono inoltre presentati alcuni dei miti che negli ultimi cinquant’anni avevano fatto grande e reso popolare il jazz: la celebre orchestra di Duke Ellington, B.B. King, Sarah Vaughan, e, infine, Miles Davis.

Google translates this - very loosely - as:

'In the days 8-9-10 November 1973 was held the XIV International Festival of Jazz which showed interesting groups of young people: one Italian, the Big Band of the students of the Conservatory of Bologna, directed by Ettore Ballotta, the other American, "The Young Giants of Jazz "with Jimmy Owens, Gary Burton, Cedar Walton and Roy Haynes. They were also presented some of the myths that over the past fifty years had made great and popularized the jazz orchestra of the famous Duke Ellington, BB King, Sarah Vaughan, and finally, Miles Davis.'

From the ever-reliable Ellingtonia discography, full details of the engagement are as follows:

DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS ORCHESTRA  Bologna, I       8 November 1973

Concert, Palasport

Mercer Ellington(t); Harold "Money" Johnson(t,v); Barry Lee Hall, Johnny Coles(t,flh); Vincente Prudente, Art Baron(tb); Chuck Connors(btb); Russell

Procope(cl,as); Harold Minerve(cl,as,fl,pic); Harold Ashby(ts,cl); Paul Gonsalves, Percy Marion(ts); Harry Carney(cl,bcl,as,bar); Duke Ellington(p); Joe Benjamin(sb); Quentin White(d); Anita Moore, Tony Watkins(v)

¬ Kinda Dukish                                    

_| Rockin' In Rhythm

Creole Love Call        

Satin Doll       

Spacemen     

In A Sentimental Mood        

¬ Caravan     

_| In Triplicate (In Duplicate)         

New York, New York - vAMo           

I Got It Bad - vAMo   

Blem - vAMo 

Chinoiserie    

Basin Street Blues - vMJ      

Hello, Dolly! - vMJ     

Medley          

1. Don't Get Around Much Anymore          

2. Mood Indigo         

3. I'm Beginning To See The Light 

4. Sophisticated Lady           

Love You Madly - vTW        

Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me - vTW  

One More Time For The People - vAMo,TW          

Things Ain't What They Used To Be    

Courtesy of Spotify, here is the album, with half an hour's worth of selections from the concert programme, recorded - and released - by RAI Radio in Italy.