The latest CD from la Maison du Duke, Paris has just been released.
Jimmie Blanton chez Duke Ellington collates real rarities from the period 1940-41 which feature the man who revolutionised the use of the double bass as an instrument and who died tragically young.
While the CD features nothing that has not been made available before, a number of these recordings - and those from the Kraft Music Hall radio programme in particular were only ever issued previously very obscurely -it is excellent to have all these rare recordings gathered together in one single volume and available for many listeners to whom they will be new.
The disc is only available to members of la Maison. Clicking the link above will enable you too find out more about joining.
As part of the centenary celebrations of Jimmie's birth in 2018, I wrote apiece for the Ellington Society UK's journal Blue Light. While on the subject of the bassist, then, here is a reprint of that article, which references some of the recordings in this new anthology and a link to sample the Kraft Hall produce!
Did any instrumentalist within the Ellington Orchestra have a more far-reaching effect beyond the Orchestra itself than Jimmie Blanton?
The thought that probably no musician did is even more astonishing when one considers that the profound effect the bass player had was achieved before his tragically early death at the age of twenty-three years old.
Indeed in the timing and manner of his death (from tuberculosis), Jimmie Blanton is in many ways the John Keats of jazz, the bassist, like the poet, a figure of imposing Romantic proportions.
Along with his friend Ben Webster, Blanton’s name, of course, was lent to the most famous iteration of the Famous Orchestra: the celebrated Blanton-Webster band from the lustrous reputation and memory of which it could be argued, Ellington spent much of his subsequent career trying to escape.
The arrival of both men within the ranks of the Ellington Orchestra helped both to streamline and to modernize Ellington’s music. Whilst Webster appeared with the Orchestra both before and after Blanton’s tenure with the band, he himself was gone (dismissed in a rare instance of Duke firing a musician) a little over eighteen months after Jimmie’s death. In conjunction, Blanton and Webster were the axis of the band, making the aggregation the sonic equivalent of a luxury Pullman, Webster’s tenor the velvet upholstery, sprung beautifully by Blanton’s innovative rhythm.
Mainly because of Barney Bigard’s reluctance to play the instrument, the tenor saxophone had been largely absent from the tonal palette of Ellington’s
music throughout the thirties. The instrument became, perhaps, the defining symbol of the jazz musician throughout the so-called Swing Era and beyond into the era of ‘Modern’ jazz, reaching its apotheosis within the Ellington Orchestra with Paul Gonsalves’ incendiary 27 choruses at Newport in 1956. Of the bass, well, it came to dominate popular music, of course, particularly in its electrically amplified form in rock music. In any of the numerous ‘best of’ and ‘most influential’ lists of bassists that litter the Internet, the name of Jimmie Blanton is always high on these lists.
Beyond mastery of technique, a musician must have a story to tell and an original way of telling it. It is often said that through such profound resonance, Blanton achieved breathy ‘horn-like’ effects through his “pizzicato, arco and slapping techniques” and “articulation with the bow” (Rex Bozarth 1981, p. 41). J. Bradford Robinson at Grove Music Online, writes, moreover, of Blanton that “His strong feeling for harmony led him to incorporate many non-harmonic passing notes in his accompaniment lines, giving them a contrapuntal flavour and stimulating soloists to their own harmonic explorations.”
Such an idiomatic approach to his work must, of course, have been (quite literally) music to the ears of Duke Ellington who listened for the ‘soul’ of a man in a way no other bandleader did and wove this call of the soul into the warp and woof his own rich sonic tapestries. There is plenty of evidence how much the young Blanton meant to Ellington, not least in incorporating the bassist’s work so conspicuously into such deathless compositions as Jack the Bear, Ko-Ko, Sepia Panorama(surely towards the top end of any top ten Ellington recordings an enthusiast would foist upon the neophyte in Ellington’s world). There was also the prominence Ellington gave to Jimmie’s sound in the ‘mix’ (in the days before such a technological process was possible) in the recording studio. Attendees at the recent Study Group Conference in Birmingham who were in the audience for Matthias Heyman’s presentation will have some thought-provoking insight already into this aspect of Ellington’s relationship with Blanton (I’m sure there is a paper to be written somewhere about Ellington the Record Producer). The precedent for the studio recordings was, of course, set by the Orchestra’s live appearances where Jimmie Blanton’s position was in front of the piano and close to the microphone. As Annie Kuebler says in her superb notes for the Storyville re-issue of the Fargo recordings, “What a show of confidence from Duke Ellington to this young man who brought about a ‘renaissance in bass playing’”(that last quotation from Annie, Duke’s own words).
There were the recordings, too, however, as testimony of Ellington’s belief in his new instrumentalist. I have often wondered if the recording of Plucked Againwas not in some sense a response to Milt Hinton’s record with the Cab Calloway Orchestra of some three months earlier, Pluckin’ The Bass. The difference here is that whilst Hinton was recorded with the entire Calloway band, Plucked Again was the first of several duets with just Ellington on piano and his bassist, the pairing reaching its apotheosis with those sublime sides for RCA Victor in October 1940.
It was just Blanton, too, whom Ellington took with him on the three occasions he appeared in guest spots on the series of Hollywood radio broadcasts for Kraft Music Hall, usually introduced by Bing Crosby. The orchestra spent much of 1941 in Los Angeles for the run of Jump For Joy, hence Duke’s frequent appearances on the programme. The opening number from the revue, Stomp Caprice, was performed during their appearance on the Kraft Music Hall on 29 May 1941, a collector’s item for sure since when the Orchestra recorded the full version at the end of November, Blanton’s illness prevented him from participating in the recording session. Crosby introduced the performance in his customary grandiloquent fashion:
“Currently dividing his time between the Trianon Ballroom in Southgate and rehearsals for his promising musical revue Jump For Joy which will feature his talents both as actor and composer, the Duke whose prowess at a piano is practically legendary is at the moment prepared to regale us with a piano and bass treatment of a thing called Stomp Caprice, a jump written by the little Duke. That would be the Duke’s son, Mercer Kennedy Ellington. This is with the Duke the elder at the piano and James H. Blanton Jr, the Ellington aggregation’s maître d’ of the big bass d. Let’s do it, Duke…”
The pair proceed to perform an elegant turn on the melody which illustrates perfectly the meeting of minds as the bassist begins a solo almost as an obbligato before shouldering the main responsibility for the improvisation, the piano player providing punctuation before bringing the melody home with a glittering glissando and a full stop which almost seems to anticipate the George Shearing sound.
Blanton’s final appearance on The Kraft Music Hall Show, 9 October 1941, gives us also, at the time of writing, what is believed to be Jimmie Blanton’s final recording. His final recorded solo is a ruminative and affecting reflection on Flamingo, accompanied, ironically, not by Ellington but a flute and string chorus from the John Scott Trotter Orchestra. I do not think the performance has been released on either vinyl or CD, but visitors to Brian Koller’s Ellington discography can click the link on October 1941 and be taken to an mp3 recording of the entire show, hosted in Bing’s absence by Don Ameche.
The last word on Jimmie Blanton must be given to Annie Kuebler and, again, from her incomparable notes to the Storyville Fargo release. Annie wrote:
“Jimmie Blanton's solos sing in a way unheard of before in jazz. By realizing the solo qualities of a double bass both in accompaniment and breaks, Blanton laid groundwork for all future bassists to follow, particularly in bebop, and cast out many lines for other instrumentalists as well. At twenty years of age, he was equally capable of contributing appropriate accompaniment for the band on the older pieces and standards as well. The roster of musicians whose lives were cut short by substance abuse is sad. The loss of Jimmie Blanton to tuberculosis in 1942 is tragic. He had already fulfilled his promise; who, on listening to the Fargo recording, doesn't stop to wonder where else he could have taken us?”
One of the undoubted highlights of the Fargo recording is Ben Webster’s transcendent performance of Star Dust. This particular version, Annie’s notes tell us, was worked up by Webster and Jimmie Blanton who was his roommate when the band was on the road. Close bosom friends, often after hours Blanton and Webster would go from club to club, jamming. Blanton would work up a terrible sweat, put his overcoat on when the session was ended and leave the club with the coat hanging open, his shirt collar wide.
It is an affecting image of the artist careless of his own well-being but, as the poet has it, ‘for ever young…’
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