Proofs, if any were needed...

Times Cubed

I wish I could remember where I’d read the phrase ‘Cubist stride’ as a description of the piano style of Duke Ellington. I think it’s a wonderful expression which conveys not only how Ellington approached his playing (those angular, oblique sorties on the keyboard – great planks of sound to drive and exhort the band which carried over into his solo forays) but offers some insight into the place his music should occupy not just in music (no irrelevant attempts to shoe horn his work into the ‘classical canon’) but in twentieth century art – the Picasso of the piano!

And it’s a particularly appropriate description for the film clip above where footage of Ellington performing in trio with John Lamb and Sam Woodyard is intercut with  shots of a sculpture by Joan Miró.

The film was made on la Côte d’Azur by Norman Granz during Ellington’s sojourn there in 1966.

Lilian Terry sur la Côte d'Azur...

Researching for a brief piece (which I will post soon) about Ellington’s stay on la  Côte d'Azur in 1966 led me to the website of jazz singer Lilian Terry. Her site includes a couple of fabulous photographs taken at Juan-les-Pins during Duke’s engagement there.  The photograph below is captioned as follows:

Stevie James, Lilian Terry, Billy Strayhorn & Duke Ellington
Antibes/Juan les Pins, 1966

The scene is the famous Hotel Provençal in Juan les Pins during the Festival where I was invited as singer. I met Ellington and his retinue and was practically abducted into his clan to the end of his days, bless him! We were having "breakfast at midday" in his suite. I was seated between his nephew Stevie James and immortal Billy 'Sweepea' Strayhorn who later wrote and sent me the lyrics to Star crossed lovers.

This particular song is featured on Miss Terry’s 1982 album A Dream Comes True with Tommy Flanagan, Ed Thigpen, Jesper Lundgard.

Here is Miss Terry’s beautiful recording.

It seems a while since Lilian Terry’s website has been updated. If you have further information about the singer, please get in touch via the comments page.

Last Fan Standing

In the best poem he never wrote (in truth, his introduction to the collection of reviews All What Jazz published in 1970), Philip Larkin describes his readers, the average jazz fan:

Sometimes I imagine them, sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year old detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s Begin the Beguine or The Squadronaires’ The Nearness of You; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill, to whom Ramsay Macdonald is coeval with Rameses II, and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equaled only by their insatiable demand for it; men in whom a pile of scratched, coverless 78s in an attic can awaken memories of vomiting blindly from small Tudor windows to Mugsy Spanier’s Sister Kate, or winding up a gramophone in a punt to play Armstrong’s Body and Soul; men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet.

Accidents of geography aside (since he must live in the USA rather than the UK), I wonder how wide of the mark this is as a description of David W Niven?

David who, you may ask? I had never heard of him either until the other day, googling indiscriminately as I am wont to do, I discovered the Internet Archive and the David W Niven Jazz Collection.

Mr Niven’s collection comprises thousands of hours of commercially released jazz recordings. Concerned to preserve the music for future generations and his own children in particular, he has assembled the recordings by artist and in chronological order, added his own commentary and then donated these cassette tapes to the Archive where they have been digitized and are available to download.  A PDF giving more details about the collection can be found here.

Mr Niven’s collection of Duke Ellington recordings alone comprises over a hundred and ninety hours of listening.

I should like to post one tape from the collection every week on Villes Ville, complete with the relevant snap of Mr Niven’s own handwritten index cards. We’ll proceed through the collection in reverse chronological order and eventually the posts will be indexed here, too. There will be a new tape available every Monday evening.

As a taster, here is a digitized copy of a commercially produced cassette of the album The Elegant Mister Ellington, a bootleg itself in the first instance, which finds Ellington and his orchestra in concert at The Sportpalast in Berlin, 4 October, 1959.

Stay tuned...

Serenade to Switzerland

Those of us cursed with the incurable condition known as Completism Ellingtonia can never be satisfied. Combing through the listings of a certain Internet auction house frequently turns up some new and hitherto undiscovered gem. This evening for example, I chanced upon this two disc set of transcriptions from a concert in Geneva, 1969. The discs were pressed privately which may explain the vendor's 'buy it now' price of $99.00. Plus shipping. Should you be interested, the details are here.

Courtesy of the old Cathode You Tube, I found a short clip, filmed by Roland Hippenmeyer that may well be from this engagement. The You tuber gives the date of 15 November 1969 from Victoria Hall, Genève. The date and location do not agree with anything I can find in the on-line discographies but this is par for the course: a discographical Gordian Knot which must be untied by other, more expert hands, I'm afraid.

The clip is without sound or, rather, music has been dubbed over it. Enjoyable nonetheless. It will have to do until a rather cheaper privately pressed two CD set comes along...

Second Sacred Concert

L'Ecume Des Jours