Live: February 2022

Friday, February 11, 19:00 EST

Such Sweet Thunder: A Listening Session

Renowned composers and instrumentalists Courtney Bryan and Nicole Mitchell will join Professor Brent Hayes Edwards for a live listening session featuring the Duke Ellington Orchestra's 1957 recording of Such Sweet Thunder, sharing some of their favorite sections of Ellington's suite and discussing some of the innovative ways Ellington and his collaborator Billy Strayhorn orchestrated their classic "tone parallel" to Shakespeare. 

 

Please note that though this is a public event, in accordance with Columbia University's COVID-19 protocols for public health, in-person attendance is restricted to Columbia affiliates. All other attendees can attend via the event livestream.

 

Location: Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive, Columbia University, Morningside Campus

Please RSVP for a link to the event livestream and instructions for in-person attendance for Columbia affiliates.

 

Eventbrite tickets available here.

More on Stephanie Chow here.

 

Friday, 18 February, 2022, 7:00pm

 

Guildhall Big Band with Tony Kofi: The Legacy of Harry Carney

 

 

 Guildhall Big Band and their director, Matt Skelton, are joined by special guest Tony Kofi to celebrate the legacy of baritone saxophone player Harry Carney, who spent over four decades as a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

 

Renowned saxophonist Tony Kofi joins the band on the baritone sax chair in a performance featuring repertoire from Duke Ellington’s legendary 1946 Carnegie Hall concert.

 

The Guildhall is indebted to Peter Long for his expert guidance and knowledge of this material and in preparing the band for this performance.

 

Details here.

 

 

 

Live: January 2022

15 January -23 January, 2022 

Symphonic Ellington 

The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at The Walt Disney Concert Hall, Hollywood Bowl

 

Programme details here.

 

 

26 January, 2022 

Black, Brown and Beige and Sacred Music 

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 

with Audra McDonald, The Jazz Orchestra at Dr Phillips Center 

Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Bethune-Cookman University Concert Chorale

From the website:

 

Jazz is America’s music—and Duke Ellington was its number one creator. His work 

 

Black, Brown and Beige is an American masterpiece that set out to broaden a person’s—and a country’s—sense of history. Critics panned its premiere in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1943, simply because it was ahead of its time.

 

Now, 80 years later, special guest Audra McDonald will join The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, along with members of The Jazz Orchestra at Dr. Phillips Center, players from Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Bethune-Cookman University Concert Chorale to honor Ellington’s most significant work. This monumental evening will feature the professional world premiere of the orchestration of Black, Brown and Beige created at Ellington’s request. 

 

Seats will fill up fast. Get tickets now for the performance of a lifetime—as Steinmetz Hall continues to take its place as one of the world’s most important concert halls.

 

 

27 January, 2022, 3:00PM (EST)

 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a Black King of the Bible in Duke Ellington’s 

Symphonic Triptych Three Black Kings

Jazz composer, pianist, jazz orchestra leader, and symphonic orchestra conductor, Duke Ellington also composed some symphonic works of great complexity. Three Black Kings,  a score for ballet, was his last major work. The first movement represents Balthazar, the Black king of the Nativity; the second portrays Solomon, King of Israel; and the third celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ellington's personal friend.

Luca Bragalini will discuss Martin Luther King’s musical depiction in Three Black Kings,  with an analysis of the implications of the Black King’s imagery in art history, political thought,  and the importance that religion has had for the African American community.

 

Tickets available here.

 Monday, 31 January 2022

 

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Duke Ellington Orchestra directed by Jeremy Price

Afro Bossa

Details here.

Super Stacks

 

Photograph enhanced digitally by Jack Chambers

The second issue of the newsletter Tone Parallel, courtesy of the publishing platform Substack, is available to subscribers now.

 

Here is the opening of this edition...

 

The Kodacolor snapshot above, bleached now by the passing years, was taken on 29 May 1970.

 

The occasion was to commemorate the dedication of the new Alvar Aalto Library at Mount Angel Abbey, a Benedictine community, some forty miles south of Portland in Oregon.

 

The photograph was the property of the young woman standing to the right of Duke Ellington. Her name is Ann Henry.

 

According to the website Second Hand Songs, Ann Henry was a singer, dancer, choreographer, impressionist and comedienne from Chicago who was billed as “the female Sammy Davis Jr.”

 

A decade before the commemoration of the Abbey library, Ann Henry’s career was in full swing. Her big break came in 1952 when she replaced Eartha Kitt in the musical revue New Faces. Her most successful recording would seem to be a single of Like Young, the André Previn composition to which Paul Francis Webster (lyricist for Ellington’s Jump For Joy) set words. In 1958, at the age of twenty-five, she travelled to London to appear in a musical presentation for Granada Television entitled On The Air. Whilst readying a concert tour for which she had been composing her own music in 1963, she was stricken by spinal meningitis which effectively ended her professional career as an entertainer.

 

While she almost lost her life to the illness, Ann Henry did make something of a remarkable recovery, regaining her mobility to an extent and moving about using a pair of cane walking sticks (and, indeed, managing to continue something of her recording career, at least:  in November 1964, she was on backing vocals for Dizzy Gillespie’s album Jambo Caribe).

 

Having already begun to write music herself, as she recovered, Miss Henry took up the post of composer-in-residence at Mount Angel Abbey. She had exchanged the bright lights of Las Vegas for a narrow, soundproof converted storeroom in a small guesthouse at the monastery. It was from there that she composed the work Pockets: It’s Amazing When Love Goes On Parade which was created to celebrate the commemoration of Mount Angel Abbey library and was given its première by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, arranged by Ron Collier and featuring Ann Henry for that occasion.

 

To subscribe, go here.