A curio listed as a recent lot on a certain Internet auction house. The vendor has included several snaps which allow us a peek behind the magic curtain in the era of white-walled car tyres, fedoras, suburban easy listening and 'Hi, honey, I'm home'. Whilst relatively innocent in the 1950s, the encouragement provided by these pictorial papers to chase bunny girls will take the pursuer down a rabbit hole and into some very dark corners from which they are unlikely yet to have been able to emerge.
The objectification of women is a topic beyond the scope of this blog so suffice it to say, it is the picture of Duke Ellington which draws the eye here and is new to me, I must admit. Duke gets top billing in an article which the vendor's photographs allow us to read in full. Since the asking price of the publication is $99, I'm grateful to have been spared the cost of buying the original in order to read it.
The article, entitled Playboy's All-Time All-Star Jazz Band by one Jack Tracy offers some interesting contemporary perspective on the history of jazz and its stars and one particularly poignant line, that Charlie parker "died of a heart attack while this article was being prepared."
The writer's assignment is to assemble an all star aggregation, built around the instrumentation of a big band (a somewhat passé form itself in terms of contemporary jazz in 1955 I would have said). Needless to say, Duke is appointed the (titular?) leader of this speculative orchestra. Call it the big band theory?
It is interesting to reflect that were Ellington to command such an organisation of star-crossed players, would it have been any more sublime than the actual Duke Ellington orchestra we got in its evolving iterations over half a century? I think not. The Duke Ellington Orchestra at any point in its history was as unique as a fingerprint. And as irreplaceable.
Click on the images to enlarge and to read the original piece...
