I Gotta Hurry Home

Duke Ellington Society UK's Uptown Lockdown was 'on the air' yesterday afternoon. The main theme was the 100th anniversary of those recording sessions which took place 'some time' in  November 1924.

A recording of the broadcast is posted below, a return, if you will, to the very beginning - the earliest recordings we have of the man who had to hurry home some fifty years later.

Here is the discographical information for those earliest surviving studio sessions:

Alberta Prime

New York City, NY

November 1924

Duke Ellington(p); Alberta Prime(v)

It’s Gonna Be A Cold, Cold Winter vAPr Blu-Disc 1007

add Sonny Greer(v)

Parlor Social De Luxe vAPr, SG Blu-Disc 1007

 

The Washingtonians

New York City, NY

November 1924

Bubber Miley(t); Charlie Irvis(tb); Otto Hardwick(as); Duke Ellington(p);George Francis(bj); Sonny Greer(d)

Choo Choo Blu-Disc 1002 

Rainy Nights Blu-Disc 1002

Jo Trent and the D C’NS

New York City, NY

Same session

Otto Hardwick(cms); Duke Ellington(p);George Francis(bj); Sonny Greer(d); Jo Trent(v)

Deacon Jazz  vJTr BD 1003

Sunny and the D C’NS 

New York City, NY

Same session

Otto Hardwick(cms); Duke Ellington(p); George Francis(bj); Sonny Greer(v)

Oh, How I Love My Darling  vSG BD 1003

Contemporary recordings by the likes of Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke or Fletcher Henderson seem much more assuredly 'jazz'. These first Ellington sides comprise a much more eclectic reach: there is the polyphonous music in the style of New Orleans, a touch of the blues in the singing of Alberta Prime (mis-spelled on the label as her surname is Pryme) in her only recorded work. And then there is the almost Vaudeville vocal approach of Sonny Greer. Everything but the kitchen sink.

But that perhaps is the point. And this may explain, in part, Ellington's antipathy to the label 'jazz' which grew only stronger as the years wore on.

When he parted company with Irving Mills, people concluded that Ellington was now free from commercial constraints and could focus entirely on 'jazz'. Ellington replied:

"That"s all bunk! I am commercial because I've got to be. The support of the ordinary masses for the music from me, which they like, alone enables me to cater for the minority of the jazz cognoscenti, who certainly, on their own, couldn't enable me to keep my big and expensive organisation going."

In the early years of the mid-twenties, everything was up for grabs. Into the melting pot of New York music came the sounds of New Orleans via Chicago, the blues, the regimented dance band sound of Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman. The modern Broadway was still in the thrall of the vaudeville and music hall approach to entertainment.  And here was this group of young men, 'players' in every sense of the word who were ready for anything. At this point in time, Ellington fancied himself as much a composer/ songwriter as a bandleader. Records very much played second fiddle to sheet music in those days and it was perhaps this sort of fame and fortune upon which the young  Ellington had set his sights (as the illustration at the top of this post shows).