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"For me it is not a chapter closed but a geological era!"
This is how his Facebook profile Luca Bragalini made his debut on May 24, 2018, when his Dalla Scala in Harlem. Duke Ellington's symphonic dreams come out in bookstores. And in fact the gestation lasted a decade and maybe more.
Tuesday 8 January 2008. The Parco della Musica Jazz Orchestra presents in Rome a program of Ellingtonian music dedicated to film music. Speaker and presenter of the evening is Luca Bragalini. On that occasion, at the end of the concert, who writes this article asks the musicologist directly about what, for at least a year, it is rumored to be a book on Ellington's symphonic music. I reply that it is being processed and that it hopes to give it to the press as soon as possible. Exactly one year before, in Chieti, the formations of the Orchestra del Teatro Marrucino together with the SIdMA Jazz Orchestra, led by the expert Bruno Tommaso, had cheered the audience of Chieti with a concert of rare Ellington music including a mysterious unpublished work called Celebration . The recording of that concert would be merged into a CD attached to the book in question.
Years go by, but the famous book by Bragalini no longer knows anything, so much to make the undersigned believe that everything was wrecked and that the project, as - joke of fate - many of Ellington's symphonic music, had run aground for some reason .
But here in the last years of that book we go back to talking. The author, contacted privately, talks about an imminent exit. We are in 2016, but it will take another two years for the volume to materialize on the shelves of bookstores and online bookstores. The publisher is one of the important ones, the Turin EDT and the book consists of 320 pages with the CD of the recording of the aforementioned concert in Chieti.
But why have we waited so long? Net of any editorial problems (of which, to tell the truth, who writes this article ignores), the answer is clear starting to browse and read the first pages of this text: it is immediately flooded by a lot of data, sources, stories, anecdotes, meticulous research. The collection and processing of this impressive amount of data must necessarily have taken a long time. Scrolling through the bibliographic sources, one realizes how hard it was for the author to complete this book.
The text investigates a portion of the immense relatively small and certainly little known ducal repertoire: Ellington's symphonic music. Between unexpressed dreams, shipwrecked projects, unanimous successes and hidden meanings, music conceived for symphonic formations reveals itself as extremely rich in interpretations and sophistication. And to give new light and to provide new means to discover and listen to it, Bragalini thinks to us, which does not limit itself to providing musicological analysis to the pieces taken into consideration, but tells its genesis, implications, context and ambitions. But we do not speak exclusively of symphonic music. It is often a pretext for in-depth study of history, art and sociology. This is how you dive, for example, in the Harlem district, a crossroads of a society and a way of life told so often by Ellington in his music, as in the monumental suite (A Tone Parallel to) Harlem or many others tracks (there is a list of as many as 26 Ellington compositions dedicated to the Black Quarter of New York!). But it is also an opportunity to get into that black cultural movement of the first decades of the twentieth century called Harlem Renaissance which laid the foundations for a new aesthetic and black awareness.
If from the first pages we are still a bit stunned by the too painstaking reconstruction of an engraving session in Milan, in which Ellington recorded a composition by the orchestras of the Teatro Alla Scala, but of which every memory and trace seemed to have disappeared ( but that the author reconstructs in an impeccable way), as the pages pass, the narration becomes more fluent and interesting. This is how New World A-Comin 'is shed new light, a composition inspired by the homonymous book by Roi Ottley and which will be performed by symphonic orchestras, big bands and Ellington solo at the piano. But the pride of this book is undoubtedly the aforementioned chapter dedicated to Harlem.
Not lacking interest are the following chapters that take in analysis equally successful compositions such as Night Creature, The Golden Broom And The Green Apple and then come to two works of composition almost unknown but of considerable interest. The first is an unfinished ballet to which the musician was working on his death bed in the hospital bed, Three Black Kings, a work dedicated to three black kings in history. The other is a work of which almost nothing was known and whose author is credited with having rediscovered it and brought it to a new light. In addition to a musicological examination, Celebration can be appreciated listening to the accompanying CD, in its only available recording (along with Three Black Kings and John Ellis' For Ellington).
What instead makes the reading of this study not complete is the impossibility of being able to consult some sound documents of which Bragalini makes extensive examination because it is unreleased tapes that the author has been able to consult thanks to the availability of some collectors. Of this thing certainly can not be made an accusation to the author but we take advantage to underline how the jealousy of many collectors is not good for anyone! We hope that some unpublished material can sooner or later be made available to everyone ...
In conclusion we can not but praise this editorial effort, because such a text was missing and not only in Italian. The Italian musicology that deals with jazz and African American music has shown in recent years to stay a step ahead of the American one. Bragalini is credited with having strongly believed in this project, which should not be underestimated, given the little-debated and well-known topic and of having tenaciously worked with a scientific method.
Dalla Scala at Harlem is a book that should not miss on the shelf of every good lover of Duke Ellington. It is a text that should be studied in conservatories and read by anyone interested in music.
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