Have you listened to Saturday Pops Concert: An Evening with Ellington yet?
When you do, be sure to listen to the first half of the concert also. It features Ellington not at all, but you will hear The Oscar Peterson Trio and Vikki Carr.
I've read very little (which does not mean to say necessarily that very little has been written) about the context for Duke Ellington's live appearances particularly in the USA. I've written before about The Golden Broom and the Green Apple which constitutes most of the programme for Ellington on this particular occasion, 3 August, 1968 though there is much more I'd like to say about this work and Ellington's symphonic works in general. That book has likely already been written, I'm just waiting for the English translation. Suffice it to say here, The Golden Broom sits rather oddly with a 'pops' concert. Oscar Peterson's music, I am familiar with and his appearance as the concert opener, given the nature of the event as a 'pops' concert seems to show a resultant tempering of his usual flights of baroque fancy, adhering mainly to the melodies of the pieces chosen.
Peterson is one of the handful of instrumental 'jazz' artists I believe who had any 'crossover' appeal to mainstream entertainment. Count Basie is another, in both cases perhaps because of their strong associations with Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra respectively. Vocalists were in a different league, of course, in terms of popularity, Ella and Frank the great survivors, nay heirs, of the big band era when the markets for jazz and pop happily collided. For instrumentalists, pop pickings were much more slim. Entirely in a league of their own on this front were Louis Armstrong and, of course, Duke Ellington.
I found far greater pleasure than I anticipated in the performance of Vikki Carr who is decidedly on the 'pop' end of the spectrum. A singer of considerable skill, however, I was more than familiar with most of the numbers she sings here, all chart hits in their day and redolent of the late sixties and she delivers them with an almost operatic aplomb. In many ways, this period was the last hurrah for the sort of suburban easy listening, middle-of-the-road music as reflected in the popular music charts. The music had travelled some distance from the great American songbook by this time as indeed had the sentiments. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart wrote mainly love songs which could be detached quite easily from their Broadway show contexts and live an independent life. Broadway after the war, it seems to me, dealt less with love songs and more with self-dramatising overcooked soliloquies. Broadway, of course, fed the hits machine but Tin Pan Alley too seemed to move away from romance into this area. In the old days, the most important word in a love song seemed to be you: Embraceable You, All The Things You Are, The Song Is You... In the next generation, this pronoun seems to have been replaced with I, Me, Mine... This trend found its ultimate expression I suppose in Frank Sinatra's hit (also 1968), My Way, the self-aggrandising dirge played in countless crematoria at which point whichever way you did it is largely academic I would have thought, but that's by the way.
Anyway, here Ms Carr's act consists of such numbers as Can't Take My Eyes Off You (there's a You there, i suppose, but the focus is my eyes...) and For Once In My Life. I... me... mine...
Ms Carr belts them out however and the melodies certainly linger on. If ever I were tempted to think they don't write them like that any more or those were the days, I have to remember that 1968 was not the best of times. Ms Carr's introduction in particular to For Once In My Life, her voice quivering with emotion, seems to allude to something altogether darker. That might have been the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy, both of which took place just a month or two before the concert. The best of times, they never were.
If you have not yet listened to the concert yet, here is a 'soundie' of one of Vikky Carr's greatest hits, It Must Be Him which was also featured at the Hollywood Bowl concert and which therefore sat cheek-by-jowl with Ellington's Golden Broom. More on the context for Ellington's live appearances as we fathom the next tape in a future post...
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