Reelin' In The Years 3: Only Joking

 First of all, a shout out to Richard Moore of Mint Audio Restoration who kindly made flat transfers of the ten reel-to-reel tapes of Ellington material I took recently to him.

On Friday afternoon, I listened to a CD of some of the contents of the second tape he had transferred. When I picked up the tapes and CDs from Richard, the note in two of the CD sleeves read Contents Not As Listed on Box.

This was initially disappointing. I had been expecting a recording of one of Ellington's several engagements at the rainbow Grill in the summer of 1967. I knew among the haul of tapes I had purchased from eBay, there were a couple of boxes labelled with recordings of the Eddie Condon Town Hall Jazz variety and I had not taken these for transfer. I assumed that one of these had mistakenly been put in the Rainbow Grill box. As I listened to the CD, this turned out not to be the case at all. The contents of this recording were in fact listed nowhere at all among the haul.

Instead, I began to listen to a monologue the contents of which could variously be described as racist, homophobic, misogynist, nay (nay!) misanthropic. What on Earth had any of this to do with Ellington?  

What I was listening to was clearly a lounge act routine by a club comic in the tradition of Joe E. Lewis ('Post time!'), the kind of schtick in which  Frank Sinatra would rather leadenly involve himself in his 'tea-drinking' monologues at The Sands. (He portrayed Lewis, of course, in the very infrequently screened The Joker Is Wild in 1957)

I missed the name of the comedian as he was announced (the audio quality shows its undoubted boot-legged origin but is perfectly listenable - content aside!). A little Googling showed me that the comedian's name was in fact Jack E. Leonard.  I had heard of him but was unfamiliar with Mr Leonard's oeuvre (...)

Suffice it to say, Jack E. Leonard's work has not aged well. I write about it here only because his act occupied the first thirty minutes of the CD I listened to yesterday. 

I listened to the CD with increasing trepidation, however, when I was sure that Leonard name checked Johnny Hodges and Cat Anderson. Were the band in attendance as Leonard 'worked the room' on that occasion? Was this the orchestra that occasionally struck a brassy chord to accompany the act? When Leonard referred to Harry Carney as having been with the band for 41 years (which dates the recording very precisely to 1968), it became obvious they were and then Leonard introduces Duke Ellington...

In my previous post, writing about Vikki Carr, I was in 1968 then. On the second tape I listened to, it was 1968 again, a couple of months earlier. And here, coincidentally, too, the material reinforces the point that Ellington kept some... unpredictable company in the course of his professional appearances. Only Ellington and a handful of other 'jazz greats' would be likely to appear on the same bill as Jack E. Leonard. I find it difficult to imagine, say, Miles Davis on this engagement or Bill Evans or Dave Brubeck.

The context of Ellington's work is fascinating. Here is an example of Jack E. Leonard's routine. I include it because he cracks the same remark about Sinatra dating someone who was teething in the recording I have.    

In my next post, I'll include an extract from Leonard's routine at the Ellington engagement. And there was to be a bigger surprise still on the tape...