There is little over a week now until the tour headed by bassist Arnie Somogyi and pianist Mark Edwards to promote the release of their new album The Ellington Piano Project.
The album has already been released across the major streaming services and the playlist from YouTube is embedded at the end of this post.
The tour culminates in a mini-festival at The Congress Theatre, Eastbourne. Dates on the tour are listed below and you can read more about the project on our previous posts here.
This is an excellent piece on the forthcoming tour from UK Jazz News by John Fordham. No copyright infringement intended.
(Click on the links for original source)
At this point, the maestro was suffering from cancer and pneumonia, though he made light of both, and he was in the last six months of his life. Several of the great soloists from the band’s glorious heyday had died or quit. And yet, as this writer recalls from hearing the band a few weeks earlier in London, the 1973 edition of this iconic outfit could still rouse a devoted crowd with the enthralling harmonies, imaginative soulfulness and driving swing that had made Ellington an undisputed giant of 20th century music in any genre.
When the band pulled up that Saturday evening at Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre, they were surprised to find microphones set up for a live recording. But the show went on, as in Ellington’s world it always had, until his much-mourned death in May 1974. The following year, RCA released a live album entitled Eastbourne Performance, because that gig in the quiet English seaside town turned out to have hosted his last known recording. Hindsight comparisons with landmark Ellington works running back to the 1920s may have affected the muted critical response the album received, though the Duke’s own jubilantly propulsive piano-playing on the set mostly did get its proper due.
This month, double-bassist/composer Arnie Somogyi and pianist, producer and arranger Mark Edwards – two of the most experienced and adaptable musicians in UK jazz – celebrate Eastbourne Performance in the most creatively personal of ways, born of an astonishing run of coincidences.
With The Ellington Piano Project: Eastbourne 1973 Reimagined, a 13-track collection of six Ellington and Billy Strayhorn originals (only two of which were on the 1973 set) and improvisations and new pieces by the pair and three empathic partners – saxist Gideon Tazelaar, vocalist Sara Oschlag, and drummer Matthew Holmes – steer a remarkable tribute that is both respectfully devoted to its source, and a creative salute to the inspirational influence Ellington had on the jazz generations that have followed him.
On a three-way Zoom for UKJN, we get together to look into how it happened. Mark Edwards takes up the story.
‘It all started in this famous old Eastbourne recording studio called Echo Zoo’, Edwards begins, ‘which is a place I’ve been going to since 1986 – Paul McCartney and Billy Bragg and all kinds of great people have recorded there, and it had an amazing vibe and fantastic vintage analogue equipment, microphones and monitors dating from the 1970s. If you wanted the wonderful as-live audio sound of the famous jazz recordings of the 1960s with people like Coltrane and Miles, you could get it there.
‘A friend of mine called Dave Lynch took it over about 15 years ago, he’s an absolute master engineer really dedicated to analogue and organic recording processes, minimal microphones, very careful mic placement. A few years back, Arnie and I did a jazz album there, using just a few microphones in the room with this old Steinway piano that Dave had acquired from the Congress Theatre. When we finished, we thought the music reminded us a bit of the 1960s Ellington album Money Jungle, which had Ellington on piano with Charles Mingus and Max Roach. The next week, Dave told me he’d just found a copy of Eastbourne Performance in a charity shop, and also that the 1921 Steinway in the Echo Zoo studio is the very piano Ellington was playing at the Congress that night. Arnie immediately said “why don’t we revisit that album? Build a project around that piano, and that iconic event?” So it started from there really’.
But hadn’t the original Ellington album been a pretty damp critical squib by the Duke’s standards?
“I think that reaction should be put into context,’ Arnie Somogyi says. ‘I’ve spoken to one of the trombonists who was on that gig – Vince Prudente, I think he’s the only surviving musician from that concert. He said the band hadn’t had a day off the road for six weeks at that point, it was a tortuous drive down from Preston, they were pretty knackered when they got to Eastbourne, and they weren’t expecting to record. Obviously, the album wasn’t Ellington’s best work, but I think the thing that stood out for me on that record was his piano playing – and also just the idea of taking bits of the source material from that night and finding beauty within it to create something new. You can always find something, and some of the compositions on our album were inspired by little fragments of Duke’s piano playing, or chord sequences or whatever, just small things that you can find as a starting point for a new narration.’
It isn’t necessary to know exactly how Somogyi and Edwards found their routes to a fresh Ellington homage to appreciate the lyrical elegance and heartfelt jazz wisdom of The Ellington Piano Project – but the background nonetheless provides a fascinating sidebar to how this distinctive venture works. There are three group improvisations spread across the set (‘Prelude’, ‘Interlude’ and ‘It Never Really Ends’), each guided by a single melodic fragment from ‘Mercuria the Lion’, an Ellington piece from the Congress gig that wasn’t included on the first LP release of Eastbourne Performance, but appeared on the subsequent CD. The fast swinger ‘Brake!’, distilled by Somogyi from Ellington’s Eastbourne piano intro to a tune called ‘Woods’, shows how perceptively Gideon Tazelaar, a 28 year-old saxophonist from the Netherlands (now living in New York and studying with the great tenor saxist George Coleman) has absorbed a tenor-sax lineage running from Ellington’s Ben Webster and Paul Gonsalves to John Coltrane and beyond. Tazelaar’s precocious sensitivity to balancing narrative emphasis and canny insinuation is evident here on ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ and ‘Creole Love Call’.
Somogyi was introduced on a Netherlands tour to the fast-rising Tazelaar by Sara Oschlag, a UK-resident Danish singer with her own infectious gift for eloquent reinvention of traditional materials. Oschlag joins this venture on three tracks, notably in an exquisitely-paced vocal of subtle swerves and wistfully gliding tones on ‘Don’t You Know I Care’ – originally a Latin-jazz instrumental on Eastbourne Performance, but transformed here by Edwards’ sumptuous intro and Oschlag’s delicately yearning interpretation.
Considering Somogyi’s and Edwards’ long friendship and musical partnership over the years, it’s intriguing to consider how much was designed and how much emerged in the live process of making this album – as ideas so often did in Duke Ellington’s own work with the musicians he knew and trusted.
‘Well, if you take the three tracks that were freely improvised,’ Somogyi says, ‘each one began with a melodic fragment from Ellington’s “Mercuria”. We used them just as spurs for free impro, did quite a few improvised takes, and then selected what we thought were the best bits. Then there are some newly-composed tracks which again come out of Duke’s playing – one of them is called “A Little Tickle”, from a figure that he plays in the middle of a solo which we worked up into a blues. The overall remit was it had to be an Ellington idea, or related to the Eastbourne album. But it’s interesting that Ellington himself would sometimes freely improvise in his own ways. There are tracks on his trio records, like Piano Reflections, and Piano in the Foreground, that are just free impros, where the trio improvise around maybe just a tonality, and it’s really interesting that he could sort of embrace that genre, but in a very natural way, play freely within his style.’
Edwards credits his co-leader in The Ellington Piano Project with a perspective that isn’t so dissimilar.
‘Arnie’s great at creating tunes from minimal information,’ Edwards says, ‘and the belief that if you put the right people together, and don’t overload it with compositional information, great things can happen. That’s about making a space, an environment where really interactive creative stuff can form.
‘For my part, I just took a couple of things from the Ellington album, and a couple of others of his that were favourites of mine, and tried to bring some fresh light to them. Much of the time what I do is production and arranging, so as we worked up those tunes, certain other sounds seemed to present themselves. Ashley Slater played trombone and trumpet on three tracks, and we used some banjo and marimba to hint at a bit of that 1920s sound the Ellington band had when it used to be The Washingtonians. But I guess above all, I was thinking of Duke’s approach to the piano. In a really interactive, listening band like his, it’s not a restriction to be mainly creating textures and hooks for the others, it’s a freedom. Sometimes to suddenly do something to really drive it, other times not play at all. With him, it was all about the overview of the thing that he kept in his head all the time, and he would only solo if there was something he could add to the whole that wouldn’t just be about him.’
I mention that conducting from the piano chair is sometimes a description of Ellington’s method, as it is of other pianist/bandleaders in jazz, like Count Basie or Fletcher Henderson – though the constant spontaneity of Duke’s piano-playing in performance, however intricate the score, perhaps makes him the most creative one, and more of an arranger-on-the-fly.
‘Arranger-on-the-fly, that’s about right,’ Edwards concurs. ‘I always think of that as the piano’s role in jazz, it’s about listening as much as playing. Sometimes you find yourself producing a recording, and a session player comes in, you put on the track you want them to play on, and they just start playing along with it like karaoke. Others will sit and listen and wait, and you know they’re thinking “where’s the gap? What can I do that’s going to add something to this?” In performance, Ellington seemed to have that head on all the time’
Arnie Somogyi, Mark Edwards, and their partners on The Ellington Piano Project: Eastbourne 1973 Reimagined will be bearing those inspirations in mind when they take this adventurous tribute to a musical colossus, and his undaunted final months of live performing, on the road themselves. As writer and musician Simon Spillett observes in this fine album’s sleeve-note, the great jazz master ‘would have found in Edwards, Somogyi, Talezaar, Oschlag and all of the musicians…an adherence to the creative credo that remained constant throughout his five-decade career: that a performer should make a piece their own, shape it as only they can, and leave those listening in no doubt as to who they are’.
The Ellington Piano Project: Eastbourne 1973 Reimagined is released on Rubicon Jazz.
Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre hosts a special Ellington in Eastbourne gala on 12 October – BOOKINGS
TOUR DATES
Forsyth’s Music, Manchester, 7 October – BOOKINGS
606 Club, London, 8 October.- BOOKINGS
Eastside Jazz Club, Birmingham, 9 October (lunchtime) – BOOKINGS
Peggy’s Skylight, Nottingham, 9 October (eve). – BOOKINGS
Jazz at St Andrew’s, Hove, 10 October.
The Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 12 October (part of ‘Ellington in Eastbourne’ gala show)
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