August in the late sixties would find Duke Ellington in residency at The Rainbow Grill atop the Rockefeller centre, NY with an octet drawn from his Orchestra.
The performances were often relayed by CBS remotes so a number of albums have been issued from this source. This month is a good time, then, to work through the issued recordings...
A few shows from The Rainbow Grill were among the tapes i've been writing about here recently
in Reelin' In The Years and two of the shows were prefaced by recorded messages, one from critic and Ellingtonian Boswell Stanley Dance and one from baritone saxophonist Harry Carney.
The identity of the recipient of the tapes and the messages is something of a mystery beyond his first name, 'Irv'. The details of 'Irv's' collection are here. Irving Mills is an unlikely Ellington collector but 'Irv' must have been someone significant in Ellingtonian circles to receive a personal message from Harry Carney. The best guess we have at the moment is the addressee may be Irving Townsend, sometime producer for Ellington at Columbia who, I believe, continued to be involved in new and re-issues of Ellington records long after Duke had left the label.
Anyway, in what is possibly a unique recording, I thought readers might like to hear the voice of Harry Carney, recorded some time in, I think, 1967, around the tile sessions were being recorded for the album And His Mother Called Him Bill...
