It's a Cracker

Here is a traditional post- Christmas treat, a performance of Ellington and Strayhorn's adaptation of The Nutcracker Suite by The Eric Felten Orchestra recorded live at Blues Alley Jazz Club, Washington DC in December 2019...

And he leads his children on...

The Duke Ellington Society UK's celebration of Clark Terry's centennial in their series Uptown Lockdown may be found here.

The finale to the programme was a recording made in 2000 by the Sun Prairie High School Jazz Ensemble, Wisconsin. Clark terry was in town and spent a day in workshop with the students, participating also in the performance that evening to an audience of 1 000.

Clark was seventy nine years old at the time and in a wheelchair. The limits of his physicality are evident in the flugelhorn solo he plays in the recording here of Ellington's Launching Pad but he remains irrefutably, recognisably Clark Terry. As you can hear from this extract, he uses his limitations to humorous advantage, sparring with a needle-sharp muted trumpet and finally surrendering with a comical 'parp'. As ever he holds the audience in the palm of his hand.

Young musicians featured include Adam Braatz on piano, Mike Ganz on flugelhorn, Paul Gerneyzke on trombone, Adam Kuhn on tenor saxophone and Trent Austin on lead trumpet. They learn here at the feet of a master.

The students would have been, I suppose, between 14 and 18 years old. They'll be in their late thirties by now. I wonder how they used this launching pad? If you read this, do get in touch via the comments section.

Teaching was always central to Clark Terry throughout his career. He may well have considered it the most important aspect of his work. The many young musicians he inspired are certainly a vital part of his legacy. Thank you for Clark Terry. All the kids in the band want you to know that they do love you madly. 

Here's an excerpt from that performance of Launching Pad...

Terry's All Gold

I am joining members of the committee of Duke Ellington Society UK today for their webcast Uptown Lockdown to help celebrate Clark Terry's 100th anniversary.

Clark's recording career spanned more than sixty years, far more than we cover in a little over sixty minutes, so for further enjoyment additional to the selections played on this afternoon's programme, here are two videos of music created in significant chapters of Clark's career.

Firstly, the music of the Clark Terry/Bob Brookmeyer quintet is celebrated in their appearance on BBC Televison's Jazz 625 from 1965. 

Secondly, a performance - or part of a performance - by the 'Big Bad Band' Clark led in 1970 featuring such luminaries as Horace Parlan, Jimmy Heath and Richard Williams. 

Clark Terry: Let's Talk Trumpet

Tomorrow, Clark Terry's centenary will be celebrated on Duke Ellington Society UK's broadcast Uptown Lockdown at 5:00pm UK time. 

The hour or so's duration of the broadcast is hardly long enough to cover the many aspects of Clark's career so today and tomorrow, here are some 'additional tracks'.

Both videos here demonstrate what a superb communicator Clark Terry was. His respect for, engagement and wonderful relationship with his audiences comprise the subject of the first video where Clark converses with long-time colleague Louie Bellson.

The second video is a superb demonstration of Clark's talent as a teacher. It is more than instructive...

Clark Terry's CenTenary...

Today is the 100th anniversary of Clark Terry's birth. In celebration of the day, here is an article I wrote in 2015 while Editor of Duke Ellington Society UK journal Blue Light.

In 1999 when Columbia Legacy released Such Sweet Thunder in stereo for the first time, much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued when it came to light that the alternative stereo version of Up and Down, Up and Down the producers had selected for inclusion did not include the famous coda played by Clark Terry quoting Puck’s line ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’. 

 Those few bars seem to capture the very spirit of the musician. Of the brass players in the studio that day, 24 April 1957, one can imagine the phrase being played by no other soloist than Clark. In its measure are all the candour, warmth and humour of not just Clark Terry’s approach to playing the trumpet or flugelhorn but his approach to life. 

Approaching his thirty-first birthday when he joined Ellington, he was, of course, a different musical generation to Stewart and his playing spoke - like his contemporary Paul Gonsalves who had joined the orchestra a year before - rather, the language of be- bop. The Ellington orchestra was more than ready to absorb and reflect this musical development, however. Earlier that year The Coronets had recorded Hoppin’ John – a bop-flavoured variation on the chords of Perdidio which was incorporated subsequently into later performances of the Tizol standard itself, including the version on the album Ellington Uptown. This version was Clark’s first major solo excursion on record with the Ellington aggregation. His two solo statements in the piece, separated by a trombone choir à la Cosmic Scene and the aforementioned Hoppin’ John, demonstrate the fecundity of ideas, the technical facility and the predilection for quotation (amongst others, here, a reference to the obscure pop standard  Cynthia’s In Love) characteristic of the bop school. They herald the arrival of a brilliant new star within the Ellington firmament more than capable of holding his own against the rest of the brass team as the stand off which occurs towards the climax of the arrangement proves. 

The sound was instantly recognizable: buoyant and confident, as modern and sleek as the lines on a Cadillac convertible or perhaps one should say, rather, the ‘longest automobile you’ve ever seen, eighty-eight cylinders’ driven through town one night at 440 miles per hour by Madam Zajj. It is Clark’s inventive, cupped, pungent boppish brass figures one hears behind Ellington’s narration during this number from A Drum Is A Woman.

Typically for this rich, allegorical fantasy – parallel to the history of jazz – Ellington cast against type: whilst Clark brought a modish new contemporary sound to the Orchestra – a breath of fresh air - it was a solo in the most traditional fashion Ellington sought from his new star turn. The responsibility with which he was tasked prompted Terry to aspire to heights beyond his stature and depths beyond his sounding. So adept a musician with such a range, Clark was not found wanting in the challenge. It was a story he told many times himself, in that chuckling, intimate tone – brandy warming in a glass – which in many ways was characteristic of the way he played the horn: 

“I told him, ‘Maestro, I don’t know anything about Buddy Bolden. I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Duke said, ‘Oh, sure, you’re Buddy Bolden. He was just like you. He was suave. He had a good tone, he bent notes, he was big with diminishes, he loved the ladies, and when he blew a note in New Orleans, he’d break glass across the river in Algiers. Come on, you can do it.’ I told him I’d try, and I blew some phrases, and he said, ‘That’s it, that’s Buddy Bolden, that’s it, Sweetie.’ That’s how Maestro was. He could get out of you anything he wanted. And he made you believe you could do it. I suppose that’s why they used to say the band was his instrument. The Buddy Bolden thing is on the record, and Duke was satisfied. So as far as I’m concerned, it was Buddy Bolden.” 

Participation in sessions for Ellington’s next album, Such Sweet Thunder, were sandwiched between studio time for Clark’s own first full album as leader, Serenade to a Bus Seat on the Riverside label. As early as 1954, Ellington seems to have been quite relaxed about sidemen such as Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves and Clark Terry participating in numerous sessions under their own name. No sideman’s efforts in this area were more conspicuous than Clark’s, however. He had led several sessions for Emarcy Records, which were compiled in various configurations as albums. It was a session as last- minute sideman for Thelonious Monk’s album  Brilliant Corners which brought his potential to the attention of producer Orrin Keepnews (who passed away a little over a week after Clark Terry on 1 March, 2015). As Keepnews himself related the story in the original album’s liner notes: 

“A jazz-magazine editor had suggested that we do a Clark Terry album. At precisely that time we were in the midst of cutting a Thelonious Monk LP. One sideman unexpectedly left town on a long road trip, Terry happened to be in town, and Monk unhesitatingly picked him to fill the gap. That meant a lot all by itself: Monk’s approval, never loosely given, has always counted for a great deal around this label. The clincher came in hearing Clark at the session.” 

The album’s title was an allusion to ‘the story of my life’ as Clark called it: a life on the road, travelling with the big bands. 

In his liner notes, Keepnews asserted that “...while his work with Duke has brought him to the attention of many, it has also had to mean fairly limited solo opportunities and a general subordination of his personal style and ideas to the quite specific requirements of the Ellington sound.” 

The album found Clark in a much more contemporary setting: two thirds of the rhythm section on the date – Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums were making waves as two thirds of the rhythm section on what became known as the ‘First Great Quintet’ of Miles Davis (the group’s first album for Columbia, ’Round About Midnight had been released in March, 1957, just a month before this session with Terry) and the third member of the rhythm section – Wynton Kelly – would join Davis for one track (Freddie Freeloader) on the seminal album Kind of Blue before taking up a place permanently with the Davis group for the next four years. 

The title track finds Clark doubling with tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin in the freewheeling, durable, long lines characteristic of the school of hard bop. ‘Jaunty’ perhaps describes Clark’s solo work here; not an adjective one would apply to his sometime pupil and fellow denizen of St Louis, to whom Clark always referred as ‘Dewey’. Six years his junior, the career of Miles Davis described a very different arc. Davis’s clinical, probing solos, the very sound of isolation, couched in those dark, spare, linear arrangements could hardly stand in more stark contrast to Clark Terry’s music and approach. 

Serenade to a Bus Seat was later often mistaken as a reference to Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks. Whatever iniquities Clark Terry suffered in that way (and he did), this was not an aspect of his life he ever chose to bring to an understanding of his work. This makes a larger and very important point about the man and his music. It was no coincidence that as a graduate of ‘the University of Ellingtonia’, his commitment to his history or heritage expressed itself professionally in a very similar way to ‘Maestro’. 

In his essay Duke Ellington’s legacy and influence (in the recently published Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington) Benjamin Bierman argues that one of the most important influences Ellington had over the young brass player was as ‘showman’. He says: 

“What makes it all work, of course, is the extremely high level of musicality that even the casual listener can appreciate. That, in conjunction with his sense of humour and his obvious desire to embrace and entertain his audience, has made him a consummate musician and entertainer. Artists like Terry continue to show us that entertainment and high art can work together in an extremely effective and appealing manner – another important element of the Ellington legacy.” 

All of this is certainly true. Equally, if not even more important, however, is the figure that Clark Terry cut within the entertainment business and his achievements within that industry because his achievements were at such a high and uncompromised level, despite the inherent social disadvantage of the times and the not inconsiderable difficulties of negotiating the politics of Civil Rights. At a time when the stereotype of black musicians as feckless, dissolute, unreliable players was an effective bar to the lucrative and secure world of studio session work, Clark Terry held down a lengthy tenure as a member of the NBC Tonight Show band. Whilst many of his contemporaries were constrained financially to leave the States for careers on the European continent, Clark forged ahead with a successful career in the most unforgiving of artistic environments, conducting himself with absolute professionalism, grace and good humour. 

Not that Clark Terry’s art was all sunshine. True, it is difficult to imagine an album entitled The Happy Horns of Miles Davis, but there was darkness, too, in Clark’s work. I am reminded of Ian Carr’s memorable description that Terry’s ‘trumpet sound became full and non-brassy, with often a cry in the note or phrase, rather like a disembodied human voice’. 

By and large, however, if Clark Terry chose, rather, to dwell in the sunlit uplands of his prodigious talent, his classical discipline, his consummate professionalism, well – in the end, such a choice, such values – a life lived well – proved themselves to be enduring when the light grew dim through the debilitating illness of his final years. His passion for teaching burned ever more brightly, however, documented movingly in Alan Hicks’s film Keep On Keepin’ On and Clark’s mentoring of the young pianist Justin Kauflin. 

And always, there will be the sound of that horn, “the effortless rhythmic buoyancy, the bluesy phrases and the quicksilver surprises of articulated thought,” (Carr again); the sound that puts to flight our mortal folly. 

Thank you for Clark Terry. 

 

Cherchez les femmes...

Excellent news from The Duke Orchestra and Laurent Mignard. Next year sees not one but two new albums from this organisation celebrating the  influence and involvement of women in Ellington's music. The press release says...

Women hold a central place in Duke Ellington's universe.The maestro dedicated more than a hundred melodies to them, painted portraits and cultivated precious collaborations adorned with tailor-made arrangements.In his new opus, Laurent MIGNARD Duke Orchestra offers a wide instrumental and vocal range in homage to the fairer sex. Eight guest artists join the jazz women of the orchestra to embody with talent and generosity the many facets of Ellingtonian elegance.

Les chanteuses invitées : Natalie Dessay, Roberta Gambarini, Nicolle Rochelle, Myra Maud, Sylvia Howard

 Les instrumentistes invitées : Rhoda Scott (orgue), Aurore Voilqué (violon), Rachel Plas (harmonica)

 

Le Duke Orchestra : Aurélie Tropez (sax alto, clarinette solo), Julie Saury (batterie), Didier Desbois (sax alto, clarinette), Fred Couderc (sax tenor, flute, clarinette), Olivier Defays (sax ténor), Philippe Chagne (sax baryton, clarinette basse), Carl Schlosser (sax ténor), Claude Egea, Malo Mazurié, Jérôme Etcheberry, Richard Blanchet, Sylvain Gontard (trompettes), Nicolas Grymonprez, Michaël Ballue, Jerry Edwards (trombones), Philippe Milanta (piano), Bruno Rousselet (contrebasse), Laurent Mignard (direction)

Duke Ladies Volume 1 will be released in Spring 2021 with   Duke Ladies Volume 2  to follow in Autumn/Winter.

Here is a 'teaser' for the albums...

Good News

Duke Ellington's Concert of Sacred Music, Coventry Cathedral, 21 February 1966, the European première of his suite In The Beginning God, has now been released on limited edition DVD by Network On Air.

This particular recording was unearthed in the archives of Coventry Cathedral by Dr Nicolas Pillai and restored by Kaleidoscope.

From the Network On Air website...

A staple genre on ITV from its early days and much loved by the viewing public, Light Entertainment shows transcended class, religion and age – their joyous mix of comedy, variety and music firmly establishing them as undeniable highlights of the weekly TV schedule. Producer of key shows across the ITV Network from the mid 1950s, ABC Television was perfectly placed to create both popular series and ratings hit specials – and this release contains four classic Light Entertainment shows from the 1960s:

SAMMY DAVIS JR MEETS THE BRITISH (1960)

Hot on the heels of his bravura Royal Variety Performance Sammy starred in this high profile TV spectacular.

STEAMBOAT SHUFFLE (1960)

The sole surviving edition of the Dixieland music series, featuring jazz legend Kenny Baker.

BIG NIGHT OUT PRESENTS THE PEGGY LEE SHOW (1961)

The incomparable Peggy Lee in her first ever British TV Show - with special guest Bing Crosby!

CELEBRATION (1966)

This trailblazing fusion of secular and sacred featured the European premiere of Duke Ellington's Concert of Sacred Music.

The DVD, which is Region 2 PAL, may be ordered here.

When Clark left The Duke

(... with apologies to John Kirby...)

14 December this year sees the centenary of Clark Terry. As the days grow short and the nights draw in, I'm taking my albums by Clark Terry down from the shelf and giving them a re-listen, digging about on line to research his work.

Given my obsession with Ellington's music, needless to say, most of the albums I have in Clark's name were recorded during his tenure with the Orchestra, 1951-59, including several with bigs co-centenarian Paul Gonsalves. 

It seems counter-intuitive to begin with Clark's work after he left Duke, but I recently encountered the following video on YouTube of a gig with  Bud Powell which took place immediately after he had left the band. The Ellington Orchestra had been on a tour of Europe in the autumn of 1959 and this was Clark's last engagement as a full time member of the band. He bailed out after the tour to take up an engagement with Quincy Jones and his Birth of a Band outfit. It was at this time, on 7 November, 1959, Clark played a club in St Germain, Paris, with Bud Powell on piano, Barney Wilen on tenor saxophone, Pierre Michelot on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums.

This particular engagement and the only other sides recorded by Clark with Powell are available on a long-out-of-print CD as part of the Mythic Sound series entitled Earl Bud Powell - Cookin' At St Germain, 57-59.

Here, however, is both sound and vision of that club date...

 

I happened upon the video because extracts of the date appear in a documentary about Bud Powell I had recently watched and burned to DVD entitled L'exile intérieur. While in paris, of course, Bud recorded an album for Reprise produced by Duke Ellington who introduced himself at the first session for the Money Jungle album by saying he was "the poor man's Bud Powell'. There is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in the documentary presented here...

Mission to Moscow: 2

 

In my previous post, I made reference to the State Department sponsored tour of Russia by a band put together for Benny Goodman. Joya Sherrill was a featured artist on that tour from which emerged her hit record Katusha. Professionally, the tour must not have been the happiest of times for her. Here is an extract from the memoir by bassist Bill Crow, To Russia Without Love, written for Gene Lees' Jazzletter. Bill writes...

Joya Sherrill was a sensation in Moscow. Goodman didn't seem too happy about it. On the first concert in Moscow, the audience's response to Joya was thunderous. The Russians had never seen anyone like her. Joya, an elegant, beautiful black woman with graceful bearing and a mellow voice, was stunning in her white strapless gown. The Russians couldn't get enough of her. They especially loved the Gershwin medley Joe Lipman had put together for her.

    For a sizzler to bring Joya on, Al Cohn had written a chart combining the tunes Riding High and I'm Shooting High. He gave it a long introduction to allow Joya enough time to walk across the stage to the microphone. There was a strong opening and a wonderful shout figure under her last chorus. Her second number, a Ralph Burns arrangement of The Thrill is Gone, began with a repeated bass figure at a slower tempo. Joya wanted me to start it while the audience was still applauding the opener, so she could begin singing as soon as the crowd got quiet again. In Seattle this routine had been very effective.

    On our second concert in Moscow, Benny canceled Joya's opener and had her begin with The Thrill is Gone. He would announce her, let her walk out with no music, take her applause, and then after it was quiet again, he would count off the introduction, leaving Joya with at least four measures to wait before she could begin singing. It gave her a much less effective entrance, but she carried it off professionally and was very well received throughout the tour.

    I never heard Benny refer to Joya by her name except when he announced her. She was always "the girl."

    "Where's the girl? We'll put the girl on next."

    One night Benny told me to play the introduction to The Thrill is Gone as straight eighth notes. It was a shuffle figure Ralph Burns had written to set the feeling for the whole arrangement. It would have sounded ridiculous as straight eighths, so I ignored Benny's instructions. As I started playing, he walked over and stuck his face right into mine.

    "Straight eighths!" he yelled.

    "NO!" I yelled back, right into his nose.

    He snapped his head back and nearly lost his glasses. I wasn't going to play her music wrong just because Benny was jealous of her. Joya, unaware of all this, continued to sing, and I didn't hear any more about straight eighths.

    One of Joya's songs was a Jimmy Knepper arrangement of The Man I Love. We couldn't understand why Benny insisted on also playing that song with the septet later in the program. It seemed redundant. There certainly were a million other tunes we could have played instead.

    Katyusha was a prewar Russian popular song that Joya had learned in Russian. Benny didn't let her do Katyusha on the first Moscow concert, but even so, Premier Kruschev sent her a note saying her singing was "warm and wonderful." Katyusha was well received when Joya sang it on subsequent concerts.

    The only place that song was not welcomed was in Tblisi, where the audience stamped and whistled until Joya stopped singing it. They were Georgians, and didn't want a Russian song. It was as if she had sung Yankee Doodle in Alabama. She skipped Katyusha and went into I'm Beginning to See the Light, with the band making up a head arrangement, and she soon had the Georgians eating out of her hand.

    A letter in Izvestia criticized the "cabaret style" with which Joya sang Katyusha, and after that there were always a few in each audience who would whistle their disapproval when she sang it. Inside a bouquet she was given onstage at one concert was a note from a Russian fan praising her rendition of the song and claiming that the whistlers were "hired goons."

    From the evidence contained on the RCA Victor album Benny Goodman in Moscow, no one would suspect that Joya had been with us on the tour. Benny specifically instructed George Avakian to omit her material, and told him not to mention her in the liner notes. George urged him to reconsider.

    "It's my album," said Benny, "and that's the way I want it."

You can read the full version of To Russia Without Love in two instalments, part one here and part two here.

Away from the bandstand or concert stage, however, Miss Sherrill looked to have a joyous time as these photographs attest. These wonderful shots are copyright Getty Images and no copyright infringement is intended in gathering them here.

 

Mission to Moscow: 1

Posting yesterday about the anniversary of Duke Ellington appearing on Time for Joya reminded me that this year makes the tenth anniversary of Joya's passing.

I posted briefly at the time and illustrated the piece with some joyful photographs of the singer from Life  in what looks like holiday repose.

In fact, the photographs were taken from Joya's tour of the Soviet Union with a band put together for Benny Goodman in 1962. While all the photographs of Joya on this State Department sponsored tour are watermarked (rightly so) and copyrighted to Getty Images, I will republish them here in continuing celebration of Joya's bright spirit.

The Russian tour was not altogether an unalloyed pleasure as an (in)famous essay about Benny Goodman  by bassist Bill Crow makes clear. I will post an extract from the essay along with the Getty images in due course.

Firstly, however, the origin of the tour was controversial in the first place. Researcher and podcaster Steve Bowie of Ellington Reflections, whose most recent podcast is devoted to Joya's music, recently shared to Facebook scans from the cover story of Jet which details the débâcle of the tour and specifically Goodman's offer to Ellington to appear as a guest star. In his typically gracious style, Ellington declined...

The Seventies: Joya Unconfined

 

Today, 30 August, is the fiftieth anniversary of Duke Ellington's appearance on the early morning children's show, Time for Joya, hosted by Ellington's former vocalist, Joya Sherill.

Here is a reminiscence from featured artist 'Mr BB', Brumsic Brandon Jr,  who created the character Seymour the Bookworm:

One of my fondest memories of taping Joya's Fun School was when Duke Ellington was our guest.

 

I had a subject I had been anxious to bring up to him since I was a freshman in High School. I had an art teacher then who had also taught the Duke and he loved to brag about it. 

He would regale the class with wonderful stories about Edward Ellington and what a gifted art student he was. For many years I harbored a burning desire to raise that subject if I were ever fortunate enough to meet the Duke. 

When he came into the studio to tape a guest appearance on Joya's Fun School I finally got to ask, "Duke, do you remember the name of your high school art teacher?" Without hesitation, Duke responded, "Of course. That was Mr. Dodson!" With enormous pride I told Duke that I had been taught by the same Mr. Dodson, who was so very fond of telling Ellington stories. 

Duke's answer satisfied my need to have Mr. Dodson's memories confirmed and it made me wonder how Duke could remember with such alacrity. I was mightily impressed! 

Later, on camera, the Duke told the kids that he and Mr BB "went to school together." Luther Henderson and I looked at each in disbelief. I thoroughly enjoyed that moment with the quietest belly laugh I have ever had. 

Mr. Dodson must have taught Duke Ellington very early in his teaching career and me just before his retirement. (My mother and Duke Ellington were about the same age.) I think Duke's faux pas ended up on the cutting room floor. 

On the same show I was honored when I got to draw a picture with the Duke. He would draw one thing and I would draw something else that was separate but related. Thanks to my wife's tenacity in a tug of war with an Ellington agent, the drawing is still ours. That composite work of art is now framed and is proudly displayed periodically in my home. 

Mr. Dodson would have been very pleased with both of us, former students, I am sure. 

There is a summary of the episode on the same web page here. Sound files of the episode are also available for download but do not seem to play on my computer. Nil desperandum... Here is the audio for the episode, courtesy of YouTube...

You can read more about the artist Brumsic Brandon Jr and his daughter Barbara here...

Earliest Date with the Duke?

What was Duke Ellington up to in 1921 while Bubber Miley was variously recording sides with blues singers?

A  clue to Ellington's activities was recently discovered by researcher Steve Bowie who broadcasts the excellent podcast Ellington Reflections.

Duke Ellington's Jazz Bandits played for dancing on 30 September, 1921 at Assembly Rooms, Annapolis, MD, returning for an engagement on 24 October.

Here are two pictures of the venue at 150 Duke of Gloucester Street, Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, MD.

From the billing in the newspaper ad, it is significant to note that one of the players is Otto Hardwick, a key player in such a small ensemble since he could play bass as well as saxophone.

Further speculation on the description in the ad from the Duke-LYM internet discussion group is that the claim Duke Ellington: world’s greatest piano player probably relates to the growing reputation Ellington had in the Washington area (Annapolis is just 32 miles from Washington) after he memorized James P. Johnson’s piano roll of Carolina Shout. The GRS piano roll had been cut in May, 1921 and Ellington worked on memorizing it using a slowed down player piano during the summer of 1921. Duke would actually appear on the same program as James P. Johnson on 25 November, 1921 in Washington DC. 

'Idolized Paris' and 'Two years London's scream' is advertising hyperbole likely less a reference to Duke than the 'banjorean' William White whose fame was 'international'.

Poor Bubber 10: Discography

The last post in our Bubber series brings us full circle to the soundtrack at least - the full video is not presently available - of the Vitaphone short that Bubber Miley recorded with Leo Reisman. 

We have now catalogued all of Bubber Miley's recordings - so far as are known, to date - outside of his work with Duke Ellington. The earliest of them are virtually a century old. Indeed, this week gone by, 10 August, 1920 saw one of Bubber's collaborators, Mamie Smith record Crazy Blues, changing the course of recording history.

A comprehensive discography of all Bubber Miley's known recordings outside his work with Duke may be downloaded here.

Poor Bubber 9: Side Trip

While Bubber was a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, he participated in a recording session accompanying the singer Martha Copeland. The session took place on 28 August, 1928 for Columbia. J.C. Johnson is on piano. Two tunes were recorded and here they are.

Poor Bubber 8: Vocal Interregnum 1925-26

Does what it says on the tin: the remaining vocal sides graced by Bubber Miley's cornet, 1925- 26 prior to his 'residency' with the Ellington Orchestra...