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.

 

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