Serenade From Sweden

 

From Vax Records...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Alice Babs’ birth and the 10th anniversary of her passing. To commemorate this, we are releasing a few albums featuring previously unreleased recordings. The first album contains American jazz standards.

Alice Babs: The Unforgettable Songbird

(1924-2014) 

Sound processing, mastering and cover design: Per Hallgren, Konfonium Audio AB

Play list jazz-related recordings with Alice Babs: https://orcd.co/y0m5gnk

Play list Alice Babs: https://orcd.co/ekv15oa

Music services to this album: https://orcd.co/theunforgettablesongbird

 

Alice Babs with Bengt Hallberg Trio and Carl Henrik Norin Orchestra

Stockholm 1963

1. Undecided 2´39 (Charles Shavers, Sidney Robin) UNIVERSAL MCA MUSIC SCANDINAVIA AB

2. Hallelujah 1´47 (Vincent Youmans, Clifford Grey, Leo Robin) WARNER CHAPPELL MUSIC SCAND AB

3. The Boy In My Dreams 2´34 (Duke Ellington, arr. Bengt Hallberg) COPYRIGHT CONTROL

 

Alice Babs with Bengt Hallberg Trio  (Lasse Pettersson, Stubben Kallin dr)

Stockholm 1963

4. Visiteur étrange 2´33 (Alice Babs Sjöblom) UNIVERSAL MUSIC PUBLISHING MGB SCANDINAVIA AB

 

Alice Bengt Warren Barker´s Orchestra

1959

5. All My Life 3´18 (Sam Stept, Sidney Mitchell) WARNER CHAPPELL MUSIC SCAND AB

6. My Resistance Is Low 2´30 (Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Adamson) MPL UK PUBLISHING

7. Sentimental Me 2´46 (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart) EMI MUSIC PUBLISHING SCANDINAVIA AB

8. What Becomes of Me 2´29 (Max Showalter, Peter Walker) WARNER CHAPPELL MUSIC SCAND AB

 

Alice Babs with Bengt Hallberg Trio (Lasse Pettersson b, Anders Burman dr)

Stockholm januari 1963. 

9. June in January 1´52 (Ralph Rainger, Leo Robin) GEHRMANS MUSIKFÖRLAG AB

 

Alice Babs with Bengt Hallberg Trio (Lasse Pettersson, Stubben Kallin dr)

Stockholm sommaren 1959. 

10. Embraceable you 2´44 (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin) WARNER CHAPPELL MUSIC SCAND AB

 

Alice Babs with Bengt Hallberg Trio

Stockholm 1963

11. You do something to me 2´24 (Cole Porter) WARNER CHAPPELL MUSIC SCAND AB

 

Alice Babs with Bengt Hallberg Quartet (Rune Gustafsson g, Lasse Pettersson b, Stubben Kallin dr)

Stockholm januari 1962

12. As time goes by 3´28 (Herman Hupfield) WARNER CHAPPELL MUSIC SCAND AB

 

Alice Babs and Ulrik Neumann

Stockholm december 1960

13. A lovely way to spend an evening 3´01 (Jimmy McHugh, Harold Adamson) COPYRIGHT CONTROL

 

Alice Babs with Bengt Hallberg Trio 

Stockholm 1963

14. The song is ended 2´18 (Irving Berlin) UNIVERSAL/REUTER-REUTER FÖRLAG

 

Discography: Ellington In Order Volume 7 (1936- 37)

 

Duke Ellington and his Orchestra

New York City, NY    

29 July 1936

ARC recording session

Arthur Whetsel, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart(t); Lawrence Brown, Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol(tb); Barney Bigard(cl,ts); Johnny Hodges(ss,as); Otto Hardwick(cl,as); Ben Webster(ts); Harry Carney(cl,as,bar); Duke Ellington(p); Fred Guy(g); Billy Taylor(sb); Sonny Greer(d,ch)

In A Jam        

 

Add Hayes Alvis(sb)

Exposition Swing (Take 2)            

Exposition Swing (Take 1)

 

Billy Taylor out

Uptown Downbeat

 

Barney Bigard and his Jazzopators

Los Angeles, CA      

19 December 1936

Master recording session

Cootie Williams(t); Juan Tizol(tb); Barney Bigard(cs); Harry Carney(bar); Duke Ellington(p); Billy Taylor(sb); Sonny Greer(d)

Clouds In My Heart (Take 1)        

Clouds In My Heart (Take 2)        

Frolic Sam (Take 1)            

Frolic Sam (Take 2)            

Caravan (Take 1)    

Caravan (Take 2)    

Stompy Jones (Take 1)     

Stompy Jones (Take 2)     

 

Duke Ellington and his Orchestra

Los Angeles, CA      

21 December 1936

Master recording session

Arthur Whetsel, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart(t); Lawrence Brown, Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol(tb); Barney Bigard(cl,ts); Johnny Hodges(ss,as); Pete Clark(as); Harry Carney(cl,as,bar); Duke Ellington(p); Fred Guy(g); Hayes Alvis(sb); Sonny Greer(d,ch)

Scattin' At The Kit Kat      

Black Butterfly (Take 2)    

Black Butterfly (Take 1)    

 

Duke Ellington         

Los Angeles, CA      

Same session

Duke Ellington(p)

Mood Indigo/ Solitude        

In A Sentimental Mood/ Sophisticated Lady   

 

Duke Ellington and his Orchestra

New York City, NY    

5 March 1937

Master recording session

Arthur Whetsel, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart(t); Lawrence Brown, Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol(tb); Barney Bigard(cl,ts); Johnny Hodges(ss,as); Otto Hardwick(cl,as); Harry Carney(cl,as,bar); Duke Ellington(p); Fred Guy(g); Billy Taylor, Hayes Alvis(sb); Sonny Greer(d); Freddy Jenkins(ch)

The New Birmingham Breakdown (Take 1)     

Birmingham Breakdown  (Take 2)         

Scattin' At The Kit Kat      (Take 1)         

Scattin' At The Kit Kat      (Take 2)         

I've Got To Be A Rug Cutter( Take 1)    

v IA, Rex Stewart, Harry Carney, Hayes Alvis

I've Got To Be A Rug Cutter (Take 2)    

v IA, Rex Stewart, Harry Carney, Hayes Alvis

The New East St. Louis Toodle-O (Take 1)      

The New East St. Louis Toodle-O (Take 2)      

 

Cootie Williams and his Rug Cutters

New York City, NY    

8 March 1937

Master recording session

Cootie Williams(t); Joe Nanton(tb); Johnny Hodges(ss,as); Otto Hardwick(cl,as,bsax); Harry Carney(bar); Duke Ellington(p); Hayes Alvis(sb); Sonny Greer(d)

I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me (Take 1)           

I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me   (Take 2)         

Downtown Uproar( Take 1)         

Downtown Uproar( Take 2)         

Diga Diga Doo (Take 1)     

Diga Diga Doo (Take 2)     

Blue Reverie (Take 1)        

Blue Reverie (Take 2)        

Tiger Rag (Take 1)  

Tiger Rag (Take 1)  

 

Duke Ellington and his Orchestra

New York City, NY    

9 April 1937

Master recording session

Arthur Whetsel, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart(t); Lawrence Brown, Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol(tb); Barney Bigard(cl,ts); Johnny Hodges(ss,as); Otto Hardwick(cl,as); Harry Carney(cl,as,bar); Duke Ellington(p); Fred Guy(g); Billy Taylor, Hayes Alvis(sb); Sonny Greer(d,ch); Ivie Anderson(v)

There's A Lull In My Life vIA (Take 1)     

There's A Lull In My Life vIA (Take 2)     

It's Swell Of You vIA (Take 1)       

It's Swell Of You vIA (Take 2)       

You Can't Run Away From Love Tonight (Take 1)                 

You Can't Run Away From Love Tonight (Take 2)     

 

Duke Ellington and his Orchestra

New York City, NY    

22 April 1937

Master recording session

Arthur Whetsel, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart(t); Lawrence Brown, Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol(tb); Barney Bigard(cl,ts); Johnny Hodges(ss,as); Otto Hardwick(cl,as); Harry Carney(cl,as,bar); Duke Ellington(p); Fred Guy(g); Billy Taylor, Hayes Alvis(sb); Sonny Greer(d,ch); Ivie Anderson(v)

Azure(Take 1)         

Azure(Take 2)         

The Lady Who Couldn't Be Kissed        

Old PlantationvIA    (Take 1)         

Old PlantationvIA    (Take 2)         

 

Barney Bigard and his Jazzopators

New York City, NY    

29 April 1937

Master recording session

Rex Stewart(t); Juan Tizol(tb); Barney Bigard(cl); Harry Carney(bar); Duke Ellington(p); Billy Taylor(sb); Sonny Greer(d)

Lament For Lost Love (Take 1)   

Lament For Lost Love (Take 2)   

Four And One Half Street (Take 1)         

Four And One Half Street (Take 2)         

Demi-Tasse (Take 1)         

Demi-Tasse( Take 2)         

Jazz A La Carte (Take 1)         

Jazz A La Carte (Take 2)         

 

Water, water everywhere...

I am presently working on a set of liner notes for a CD to be released later this year and in the course of my researches, I happened upon the website of The Gotham Center For New York City  History.

Duke Ellington's appearance at The Aquacade is frequently cited as the nadir of his professional career and an indication of the challenges for 'big bands' - and Ellington in particular - during that period of the mid-fifties. The extract from the article on the Gotham website offers an interesting 'take' on this point of view, however. Click on the link to the Aquacade above for other materials here on this engagement...

31 July 1955

…the 1955 season brought in an entirely new challenge to the Parks Department vision. The star attraction was Duke Ellington, famed jazz composer, and his orchestra. Ellington’s presence immediately made Department of Parks officials nervous. Interdepartmental communications included inquiries as to whether Chief Designer, Stuart Constable, was “keeping a close eye” on that year’s program. He could not “let Murphy turn this into a loud, disorderly outdoor jam session" and warned that "he always needs watching.” In another Department memo, Constable reassured colleagues; “Murphy stated that the music will not be of the rock and roll type. We will however, watch this closely.” 

 

Their concern stemmed from conceptions of Ellington and his chosen idiom — jazz — as well as its successor, rock ‘n’ roll. But here Parks officials' anxieties exposed the conflicting cultural currents at work in postwar America. By the 1950s, Ellington was highly regarded. He had spent two decades cultivating a professional persona as a highly skilled, “serious composer,” and many Americans would have perceived Ellington as conservative elder statesman of the genre. Characterized by historian Harvey G. Cohen as "Harlem's Aristocrat of Jazz,” Ellington’s image evaded racial stereotypes that excluded many African American performers from mass appeal. By the time of his gig with the Aquashow, Ellington had long since built a multi-racial audience and distanced himself somewhat from the Cotton Club and Harlem.

 

But white critics from the early to mid-20th century cast jazz as a racialized primitive genre, lacking melody or sophistication. Scholar, Maureen Anderson, affirms that until 1960 many writers continued to equate their distaste for jazz with a disdain for African Americans. In the case of the Parks Department’s unease, it’s possible they continued to associate Ellington with the racialized, improvisational music of the 1920s. Moreover, both jazz and rock ‘n’ roll appealed to younger generations. According to musicologist, James Wierzbicki, both genres prompted similar white assumptions of the music’s corruptive power “by conservative members of an older generation.” This may very well have applied to Robert Moses and his colleagues, whose approval of Ellington did not go beyond reasoning that he would be “OK,” and who, from the early days of Flushing Meadow’s postwar improvement, expressed a wariness of the growing black population in nearby Corona.

 

Ellington’s ties to jazz, however, were still racialized, coded as urban and understood by the Department of Parks as a potential threat coming to Queens. Particularly troubling to them seems to have been Ellington's (and jazz's) associations with musical improvisation, as evidenced by Moses' concerns about a possible "outdoor jam session." While the disorderly sounds of jazz could be contained within the walls of a Manhattan night club or by the conventions of "segregated" radio programming, the open-concept amphitheatre gave Ellington direct sonic access to hundreds of households in the vicinity of the park.

Despite these concerns, Ellington's performance received positive press from around the country. In African American newspapers he was lauded not only for the performance but for his role as musical director of the all-white Aquashow. For Elliot Murphy's part, he had in the end successfully recruited one of America's most respectable and refined artists for amphitheater performances. The enticement of Manhattan’s best acts to the amphitheatre, of course, had been one of the Parks Department's earliest aspirations for the venue. Their irritation with Ellington's tenure, however, suggests that only some parts of Manhattan were deemed suitable for export to the suburbs.

Source.

Variously Jumping

Two theatre programmes for the 1941 production Jump For Joy emerged recently on eBay. Here are the photographs the respective vendors provided. There are some interesting variations in the programming...

And here are images from the theatre programme...

 

Goin' Up

Washington 1983 saw the first meeting of The Duke Ellington Study Group. The study group was an informal body largely concerned with organising what were for a good few years annual International Duke Ellington Conferences. This piece is from The Washington Post, 1983. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended. 

Elevated Ellington

By W. Royal Stokes

May 3, 1983

DUKE Ellington was born in Washington in 1899, grew up at 1212 T St. NW and, after dropping out of Armstrong High School several months before graduation, was booking his first band into local dance halls for $5 a night. When he died in 1974 he was recognized worldwide as a major 20th-century composer, a preeminent orchestra leader and one of the most influential jazz musicians.

 

Thursday through Sunday, the local chapter of the international Duke Ellington Society will host a conference whose stated purpose is to foster "appreciation and understanding of Ellington's music and to learn what books and publications are available and what we can all do to keep Ellington and his music alive for generations to come." Scholars and collectors from this country and abroad will present papers and participate in panel discussions, rare film footage of the great orchestra will be shown, and several Ellington band alumni will attend. A concert of Ellington's music by the Army Blues will kick off the four-day meeting Thursday evening in Brucker Hall, Fort Meyer, and a sightseeing bus tour of Ellington landmarks will conclude the conference Sunday. (Headquarters will be at the Hampshire Motor Inn, Langley Park, but locations of the various functions will be scattered. For more information call 559-4126.)

 

Terrell Allen, president of the Washington chapter since the early 1960s, reminisced about his introduction to Ellington's music and to the Duke himself: "I first heard the Ellington band on record back in 1934 when I was a young buck," he said, recalling his early years in Pittsburgh. "I come from a very orthodox religious family and they thought all that kind of music was the devil's music, and I had to sneak out when I was 11 or 12 to go hear jazz." Allen had already caught the band at the Apollo Theatre in New York before his family moved to Washington in 1939 and he began to regularly attend band performances at the Howard theater. He remembers Ellington as "very, very gracious to teen-agers, he never fluffed us off. Very regal, but not an aloof person. And every opportunity I had I'd go backstage and speak to him. I called him Mr. Ellington and when I got older I called him Duke."

 

Longtime Ellington Society member Jack Towers describes the organization as "a device to get a bunch of folks together of like mind to re-examine and keep abreast of what turns up in the way of Duke's stuff." Towers says that until a few years ago he assumed the well had run dry, but that broadcasts recorded at home as early as the 1930s and "shellac pressings of takes that had never appeared before" are now surfacing at such a rate they constitute "an avalanche."

 

Besides open meetings on the first Saturday evening of every month at the Omega Psi Phi house on the campus of Howard University, the local chapter of the Duke Ellington Society maintains an informal correspondence with chapters in New York, Chicago and Toronto, and with individual members throughout the world. Last week it initiated a projected ongoing relationship with the Ellington School of the Arts with a film-lecture that it expects to repeat annually. Not least among the society's objectives is to encourage area broadcasters to air more of Ellington's music. And until Ellington's death, whenever his orchestra was in the area, it was always entertained at the fraternity house or at the home of a society member. The Duke sometimes was not able to attend, but when he could make it, says Allen, "it was very special."

 

Among the participants in the conference will be several eminent Ellington researchers from abroad including jazz film scholar Klaus Stratemann from Germany, Eddie Lambert from England and Joe Hoefsmit from The Netherlands.

 

The Smithsonian's Martin Williams will speak on Ellington as a composer and Dan Morgenstern of Rutgers' Institute of Jazz Studies will discuss "Duke and the Tiger Rag." A longtime associate of Ellington, Pat Willard, will come from California to offer some personal insight on the band leader's last and uncompleted project, the musical Queenie Pie. Friday night will feature "A King's Ransom of Ellington's Cinematic Features and Featurettes," presented by a chief collector of Ellingtoniana, Jerry Valburn. And somewhere in the crowded schedule a place will be found for Washington guitarist Bill Harris to play a medley of Ellington compositions.

 

The frosting on the cake will be the opportunity for guests to rub shoulders with some Ellington alumni, including several who reside in the area: saxophonist and band leader Rick Henderson, vocalist Jimmy McPhail and, hopefully, bassist Billy Taylor. Former Ellington band vocalist June Norton and clarinetist Barney Bigard's widow are also expected. Dennette Harrod, who has had a lifetime love affair with the Ellington orchestra since he first met its leader at the stage door of the Howard theater in September of 1931, will host a reunion reception with these surviving associates of the Duke. Harrod will also play a tape of a recent telephone interview he conducted with trombonist Lawrence Brown (now living in California), whose membership in the Ellington Orchestra began in 1931 and ended in 1970.

                                                                                                                                  

Source: The Washington Post