Wednesday, 11 March 2020

Ellington 2020: Agenda

I write this in the UK on the eve of  The 26th International Duke Ellington Study Group Conference. Here, for the record, are details of the agenda for the conference...

Thursday, March 12
8:00AM
  • REGISTRATION and coffee: Leavey Center, Salon H
9:00AM
  • Welcome – Anna Celenza, Georgetown University
9:10AM-12:00PM - SESSION I
9:10AM

Ken Steiner

DUKE ELLINGTON AND THE RISE OF RADIO: THE COTTON CLUB ERA 1927-33

 

Duke Ellington’s rise to popularity was concurrent with the rise of radio itself.  Duke’s opening at the Cotton Club on December 4, 1927 – and the broadcasts that came with it – was “the beginning of Duke’s national popularity,” as Sonny Greer recalled. It didn’t happen overnight though. For the first fifteen months at the Cotton Club, Ellington broadcast over local independent station WHN’s erratic signal. 1929 was the year Ellington went national.  Radio was exploding in growth, and William Paley, in a challenge to the powerful NBC networks, was looking for hot new programming for his upstart Columbia Broadcasting System. At the urging of sportscaster and Cotton Club enthusiast Ted Husing, Ellington was signed to broadcasts over CBS’s clear-channel flagship WABC and its coast-to-coast network. Beginning in February of 1929, Ellington’s eerie tunes and the Cotton Club were widely broadcast. One-and-half years later, Ellington was lured to NBC and their Blue and Red networks. Ellington was heard over more stations, with greater coverage, and more prestige. Ken Steiner, using the latest research, will explore Duke’s Cotton Club broadcasts, and will trace their growth from WHN to CBS then NBC, the extent of their coverage, their changing nature, and impact.

 Kenneth R. Steiner is a 1975 graduate of Georgetown University, earning an AB in History with distinction. At Georgetown, Ken took a Jazz History class, presented a radio show over WGTB, and attended a Duke Ellington concert at Georgetown’s Gaston Hall. He’s been under the spell of Ellington’s music ever since. He has benefitted from friendships with members of the DC Chapter of the Duke Ellington Society including Jack Towers and John Malachi. His first Ellington Conference was in 1999 in Washington, DC. Ken has researched Ellington’s itinerary from 1923 to 1941 through newspapers and magazines, court records, and discographical information. He has spoken at Ellington Conferences in Stockholm, London, Amsterdam, Portland, and New York. Ken lives in Seattle.

9:50AM                

Maristella Feustle

DUKE ELLINGTON THROUGH THE EYES AND MICROPHONE OF WILLIS CONOVER

Willis Conover’s career is like a thread running through the history of jazz after the Second World War. Following that thread reveals enlightening connections between Conover’s activities and those of top jazz artists, especially Duke Ellington. While Conover is best known for his 41 years as a broadcaster of jazz for the Voice of America, his career at the VOA continued relationships he had already developed as a local radio personality and concert promoter in Washington, D.C. One of those relationships was a lifelong friendship with Duke Ellington, from
the late 1940s until Ellington’s death in 1974. Conover even got to ride on the tour bus with the band for two weeks in the late summer of 1949. Twenty years later, Conover was instrumental in organizing Ellington’s 70th birthday party at the White House. Conover kept copies of the work he was proud of, and documentation of these events resides in his personal collection at the University of North Texas Music Library. Such documents include digitized recordings of interviews with Ellington in 1946, 1948, 1955, 1961, and 1973, and improvised solo piano
performances. Ellington seemed at ease with Conover, and exchanges with a friendly, knowledgeable interviewer yield inherently different results from those of a more general audience. This presentation will highlight primary source Ellington materials from the Conover Collection, for two purposes: First, any new discovery of Ellington speaking or playing is intrinsically valuable for capturing how he thought and played at a given moment in time. In addition, millions of international listeners gained exposure to Ellington’s music mediated by Conover’s own perspective and experiences. It is therefore instructive on many levels to look more closely at Ellington through Conover’s eyes.

Maristella Feustle is the Music Special Collections Librarian at the University of North Texas. She is an alumna of both the jazz studies (M.M., 2009) and library science (M.S., 2010) programs at UNT, and serves as one of two representatives from the Music Library Association (MLA) on the National Recording Preservation Board. She also serves on the Society of American Archivists' Technical Subcommittee on "Describing Archives: a Content Standard," and as editor for MLA's Index and Bibliography Series. She has published several articles, presented in five countries, and remains active in the Dallas area as a jazz guitarist.

10:30AM – BREAK


10:40AM

Reuben Jackson

I WONDER AS I WANDER:  DUKE ELLINGTON AND THE NATURAL WORLD, 1927-72

This presentation seeks to focus on entrancing examples of Duke Ellington’s nature-inspired compositions.  From early recordings such as Rainy Nights to the aural portrait of Two mountains in Mexico (The Sleeping Lady and The Giant Who Watches Over Her from the Latin American Suite), Ellington’s music was characterized by an ever present timbral invention and wonder. The musical examples I will feature in this presentation will be interspersed with brief quotes by Ellington and/or Billy Strayhorn.  In their own voices, they add meaning to the music I will share.

Reuben Jackson is Archivist with the University of The District Of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. From 1989 until 2009, he was Archivist and Curator with the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection. From 2012 until 2018, he hosted Friday Night Jazz on Vermont Public Radio.

11:20AM

Michon Boston

ELLINGTON, SHAW & U, THE HOUSE THAT JASS BUILT 

This presentation covers the years 1914-64 or the start of WW I until the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Ellington is woven throughout. It includes the rise of jass in the culture after the death of Scott Joplin. The role Congress played in containing the music in DCPS (often those attempts failed), and the community that supported Ellington’s development as a musician and composer. And, the story of Emma Gordon and her cousin Edgar McEntree – close friends and colleagues of the young Ellington. 

Michon Boston is a writer and founder/executive producer of the Michon Boston Group creating engagement strategies and productions to connect storytellers to communities for maximum impact. Through her work with television, film, cultural institutes, authors, and artists, Michon ensures that the important voices and stories of today are heard in the communities where they are most needed. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Washington City Paper, Washington Post Magazine, The Root, and Oberlin Alumni Magazine.


12:00PM - LUNCH BREAK
1:30PM

John Edward Hasse

FINDING DUKE ELLINGTON AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Many in the world of Ellingtonia are aware of the pre-eminent Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, numbering 200,000 pages of music and documents.  What is not as well-known are the dozens of other Museum collections that include significant Ellington material—the papers of Barney Bigard, Rex Stewart, Cat Anderson, Ruth Ellington, Gaye and Edward Ellington, et al.  And here are Ellington portraits, photographs, and recordings in other Smithsonian museums.  This talk provides an overview, points to highlights, lends advice on accessing these treasures, and addresses the question of what difference it makes.  
3:30-4:30PM

Allyn Johnson

RECITAL: DUKE ELLINGTON’S WORKS FOR PIANO

Allyn Johnson is a multi-talented musician, composer-arranger, recording artist and producer with trademark sound in the world of jazz. A pianist of international recognition, he performs with a “who’s who” of jazz musicians at major jazz venues, festivals, and events and has a growing library of compositions and arrangements. Described in the DC jazz guide Capital Bop, as the “Dean of DC Jazz,” Johnson “is known as both a performer who can draw capacity crowds to venues around the city and an educator whose position as the director of Jazz Studies at the University of the District of Columbia makes him a key player in the cultivation of DC’s next generation of torch carriers.”

4:30-5:00PM - COFFEE BREAK
 5:00-6:30PM        

Joe Medjuck

FILM SCREENING: FESTIVAL “THE DUKE” (1965)

On March 3, 1965 the CBC TV Program Festival broadcast an episode titled The Duke. This screening will be the first time the film has been viewed in thirty-three years. It’s last screening occurred at the Duke Ellington Conference in Toronto in May 1987.


Joe Medjuck is a retired film producer who received his BA in English from McGill University and his MA and PhD from the University of Toronto, where he taught for twelve years and founded the Cinema Studies Program. Medjuck also worked as a journalist for the film magazine Take One, Canadian Forum, The Times Literary Supplement, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and TVOntario. His producing credits in the US include the films Stripes, Heavy Metal, Ghostbusters, Twins, Beethoven, Kindergarten Cop, Dave, Junior, Commandments, Father’s Day, Private Parts, Space Jam, Six Days, Seven Nights, Road Trip, Old School, Up in the Air, No Strings Attached, Hitchcock and Draft Day. In television his producing credits include the cartoon shows The Real Ghostbusters, Beethoven and Mummies Alive! as well as the Emmy-nominated HBO film The Late Shift. Medjuck was one of the founders of The Criterion Collection. He has attended four previous Ellington Conferences, written for Blue Light and the DESS Bulletin and first wrote about Ellington in 1965 when he reviewed a night club performance for The McGill Daily.

Friday, March 13
8:00am
  • REGISTRATION and coffee: Lohrfink Auditorium lobby (GU Hariri Building) 
9:00-12:30 - SESSION II
9:00AM

David Berger
ASSESSING THE ELLINGTON STYLE
For twelve years I taught a two-semester graduate course on Duke Ellington at the Manhattan School of Music, where I supplied hundreds of recordings and full scores of Ellington’s music. Although Ellington used to say, “Too much talk stinks up the place,” and “The music speaks for itself,” in the world of academia, art must be explained to be assessed.
Starting in 2020, I will be writing a series of five books analyzing Ellington’s music in depth. Each volume will cover a decade and give analyses of the major pieces of each period with special attention to his developmental techniques—how does he tell the story, and why does it delight us so? 
My talk gives a glimpse into my approach by zeroing in on two classic pieces, one early and one late, and showing how Ellington’s music was already perfect by the age of 25, and how he expanded his scope by being inclusive to everything he encountered in life.
David Berger is a jazz composer, arranger, and conductor recognized internationally as a leading authority on the music of Duke Ellington and the Swing Era, having transcribed over 500 Ellington and Strayhorn full scores. Conductor and arranger for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra from its inception in 1988 through 1994, he co-founded Essentially Ellington and continues to perform Ellington clinics and concerts with high schools and colleges in the US and Europe. He taught at conservatories for 30 years including Juilliard and Manhattan School of music, and has authored four books and contributed two chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington.

 9:40AM
Hannah Krall
THE CARAVAN-ALABAMY HOME COLLABORATIVE CONUNDRUM: AN ANALYSIS THROUGH SCORES, RECORDINGS, AND ANECDOTES
Caravan is one of the most famous jazz standards of all time; the tune is performed and recorded so frequently that over 350 adaptations by other musicians exist in addition to the plethora of arrangements recorded by the Duke Ellington Orchestra. The first recording of Caravan, recorded by Barney Bigard and his Jazzopators on December 19, 1936, credits Juan Tizol as the sole composer. Later recordings give credit to both Ellington and his manager, Irving Mills. Because Ellington and Mills’ appropriation of band members’ compositions was commonplace, it is easy to assume that the conception of Caravanfollows a similar narrative. Tizol claimed that “Duke took credit for everything I did;” he only offered Ellington credit for arranging his compositions. Despite Tizol’s insistence on compositional independence, trumpeter Rex Stewart contends that Caravan’s melody “evolved from another tune, Alabamy Home.” Alabamy Home and Caravan are surprisingly similar in melody, harmony, and exotic affect. 
Inconsistent information in Stewart’s account and the fact that Caravanwas recorded three months before Alabamy Home initially complicate Stewart’s assertion. However, the discovery of a trombone part from the Ellington archive at the Smithsonian Institution for Alabamy Home, most likely dated between 1926 and 1928, supports Stewart’s claim that Alabamy Home was written first. I suggest that Tizol refined the exoticism of Alabamy Home, originally devised for the Cotton Club, in order to create Caravan,the most famous of his self-proclaimed “Spanish melodies.” Caravan started a complicated creative process in which arrangements of Caravan and Alabamy Home inform and change one another through Ellington’s guidance. I trace the back and forth musical exchange between Caravan and Alabamy Home through four manuscripts and five recordings dated between 1926 and 1937. An analysis of the sources pertinent to the relationship between Caravan and Alabamy Homereveal the intricacies of the creative processes in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. 

Hannah Krall is a doctoral student of historical musicology at Duke University. Her musical interests include early music and jazz improvisation, traditional jazz, and music for the viola da gamba. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Cornell University. In addition to her scholarly pursuits, Hannah is an active jazz clarinetist and saxophonist. She can be heard on The Original Cornell Syncopators’ albums, Wild Jazz and Collegiate. 




10:20AM

Jack Chambers
ANATOMY OF A STOCKPILE SESSION
From 1949 until 1972, Duke Ellington assembled his band in recording studios at his own expense and produced the music known as “the stockpile.” At least 200 such studio dates survived (128 in tapes bequeathed to Radio Denmark plus 84 released before the bequest).
Ellington’s “pleasure with the imperfect” abounds in these impromptu affairs. Inquiries about a 1972 session in Toronto revealed the scuffling that produced six complete takes on Laserlight 20 years later. It began with a phone call from Ruth Ellington to Ron Collier, the Toronto composer: “Book a studio and bring some charts.” Discographies (following Timner) show a single session but there were actually two sessions five days apart; tapes from the two sessions were merged on delivery. Personnel differs from the extant list: trumpeter Arnie Chycoski, mis-identified as Fred Stone, played lead at one session while Mercer Ellington sat out, and Tyree Glenn was absent from the first but present at the second. Of the eight charts, two were Ron Collier’s: “Vancouver Lights” ended when Cootie Williams refused to play another take; it has never been released. “Relaxin’,” a blues contrasting Procope’s clarinet and Carney’s baritone, was released but mistakenly titled “Vancouver Lights” by CD producer Stanley Dance, who admitted, “When we got the boxes, it was rather confusing.” Tyree Glenn’s feature at the second session, “New York New York,” has never been listed (or released).
            These Toronto sessions were attended by a New York Timesreporter, a jazz radio broadcaster and the editor/photographer for Codamagazine (among others), but the only documentation (until now) is well-intentioned but error-filled guesswork. How many stockpile sessions are, like this one, merely best guesses? On the bright side, six tracks survived – and as Ellington always insisted, it is the music that counts.

Jack Chambers is the author of Sweet Thunder: Duke Ellington’s Music in Nine Themes (2019).His articles on Ellington have appeared in Blue Light (DESUK), IAJRC Journal,and Coda magazine.He presents annual talks to the Toronto Duke Ellington Society (since 1999) and courses and talks at University of Toronto and elsewhere. Other books include Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis (1998),winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, and Bouncin’ with Bartok: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik (2008).

11:00AM - BREAK
11:10AM

Willard Jenkins
MODERATOR: MUSICIANS' FORUM — PERFORMING ELLINGTON
Willard Jenkins serves as Artistic Director of the DC Jazz Festival. He has served in many capacities within the academic, arts, media and entertainment industries acting as a consultant, arts administrator, artistic director, writer, journalist, broadcaster, educator and oral historian. Willard has served as artistic director of the Tri-C JazzFest (Cleveland, OH), the BeanTown Jazz Festival (Boston, MA), Tribeca Performing Arts Center (New York, NY), and as artistic consultant to the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival (MD), 651 Arts (Brooklyn, NY), Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall (New York, NY) and the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC). He was the executive director for the National Jazz Service Organization and an administrator for Arts Midwest and the Great Lakes Arts Alliance. Willard Jenkins is also an experienced broadcaster, having served as program host and producer at WPFW-FM (Washington, DC), WWOZ-FM (New Orleans, LA), KFAI-FM (Minneapolis, MN), XM Satellite Radio and BET. He is also the author of African Rhythms, the Autobiography of Randy Weston (2010).



Marshall Keys
Panelist: Musicians' Forum — Performing Ellington
Marshall Keys is one of the most versatile saxophonists to ever come out of Washington, DC. He began his training in the DC Youth Orchestra Program and continued it in the Jazz Studies Program at Howard University. He cut his teeth playing in local bands before gaining his first professional experience with The Blackbyrds and a long association with the great blues organist Jimmy McGriff with whom he recorded the album “Countdown”. Marshall has worked with many of the world’s greatest jazz and blues musicians including: Lionel Hampton, Jimmy Heath, Clark Terry, Jimmy Witherspoon, Groove Holmes, Big Joe Turner and Hank Jones. He has worked with Branford Marsalis and Steve Allen, swung with Keter Betts and Al Grey, recorded with Cyrus Chestnut and Vinny Valentino, and jammed with Sonny Stitt and Stevie Wonder.

Sharón Clark
PANELIST: MUSICIANS' FORUM — PERFORMING ELLINGTON
Sharón Clark, one of DC’s finest vocalists, has brought festival and concert audiences to their feet across the U.S. and Europe. Ms. Clark has made multiple international tours in recent years, making her debut in Israel and returning to Russia, where she has developed a major following. Her most recent release, “Do it Again — My Tribute to Shirley Horn,” is on its third printing. Ms. Clark has also won numerous awards, including New York’s Bistro Award for Best Vocalist, Gold Medal at the Savannah Music Festival's American Traditions Competition, and first place in the Billie Holiday Vocal Competition. In DC, she appears regularly at Blues Alley and Loews Madison Hotel. A featured soloist with the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, the Richmond Symphony, and the Baltimore Symphony, Clark has headlined the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, the Cape May Jazz Festival and the Savannah Music Festival. Both the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and The Ludacris Foundation chose Ms. Clark to perform for their separate tributes to Quincy Jones.
Janelle Gill
PANELIST: MUSICIANS' FORUM — PERFORMING ELLINGTON
Janelle Gill, a pianist-bandleader from Washington DC, began her musical path at age five when, aspiring to a career as a concert pianist, she began taking piano lessons. As a middle school student, Ms. Gill was introduced to jazz by Delfeayo Marsalis during a workshop he performed at her school.  She continued her studies at the famed Duke Ellington School of the Arts under the guidance of saxophonist Davey Yarborough and Howard University under the tutelage of Dr. Raymond Jackson and Charles Covington. Ms. Gill has performed with Oliver Lake, The Blackbyrds, Delfeayo Marsalis, David Murray and many local artists such as Marshall Keys, Kenny Rittenhouse, Nasar Abadey and Will Smith. She can be heard on recordings by Kenny Rittenhouse, Mauro Marcondes, Kris Funn and Will Smith. Currently Janelle teaches piano and is working on writing and preparing music for her debut recording.

Ken Kimery
PANELIST: MUSICIANS' FORUM — PERFORMING ELLINGTON
Ken Kimery is a much-revered drummer in Washington DC.  He is also Executive Director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and Jazz Oral History Program. He has produced over 300 concerts in Washington, D.C.; received critical acclaim from the Washington Post; been featured in Smithsonian Magazine; and awarded “Excellence in an Artistic Discipline” at the 18th Annual Mayor’s Arts Awards.


11:50AM

Benjamin Bierman
AN EXAMINATION OF DUKE ELLINGTON’S LEGACY AND INFLUENCE: CHARLES MINGUS, GERALD WILSON, CLARK TERRY, CECIL TAYLOR, AND QUINCY JONES
Duke Ellington was a composer, an arranger, a pianist, a bandleader, an entertainer, an entrepreneur, and an important public figure, all at the highest level. After his astonishing body of music, it is Ellington’s remarkable and unmatched ability to integrate these various areas of expertise in both his music and his public persona that is his greatest legacy, and it is unrivaled in modern American music. In the broadest possible sense, Duke Ellington stands alone as America’s most complete musician.
Ellington’s breadth is not unique in the history of music, however, and is reminiscent of past musical stars such as Haydn, Johann Strauss Jr., Liszt, Verdi, and Puccini. These artists were composers, instrumentalists, orchestrators, showmen, and entrepreneurs, and they were extremely prolific, leaving legacies of artistic and commercial success. They understood what the public wanted, and with very personal and artistic voices produced some of the greatest music of the day in such a way that the public clamored for their works. This accomplishment is extremely rare, and is central to Ellington’s legacy and influence.
This paper examines how Ellington, through his uniquely broad approach to music and business, maintains his lofty position at the top of the jazz canon. To this end, I consider how Duke’s unique qualities, remarkable accomplishments, and unequalled stature have influenced five important musicians – Charles Mingus, Gerald Wilson, Clark Terry, Cecil Taylor, and Quincy Jones – who have in turn created legacies of their own. All of them greatly admired Ellington, and each exemplifies his legacy and influence in a particular area of expertise. They managed to absorb much of what Duke had to offer, embrace their own abilities (and their shortcomings), and forge a unique path that builds upon the Ellington legacy.

Benjamin Bierman is Associate Professor of Music at John Jay College, CUNY. He is the author of Listening to Jazz (Oxford University Press), and has essays in The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom, The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, Jazz Perspectives, andJournal of Jazz Studies.His compositions can be heard on his CDs, Beyond Romance and Some Takes On the Blues. As a trumpet player he has performed with such diverse artists as B.B. King, Archie Shepp, Johnny Pacheco, Johnny Copeland, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.


12:30PM - LUNCH BREAK 
1:45PM 

Tammy Kernodle
I TOO SING AMERICA: ELLINGTON, THE JAZZ SUITE, AND THE IDEA OF AN AMERICAN SOUND
This talk will explore how Ellington and Mary Lou Williams's early experimentations with the Jazz Suite as a distinct musical genre widened the compositional and sonic aspects of jazz. It will also describe how their experimentations correlated with continued efforts to promote the notion of an American nationalistic sound. 


3:30-5:00PM - SESSION III
3:30PM
Nicole Higgins
A TOME PARALLEL: MUSIC IS MY MISTRESSAND DUKE ELLINGTON’S NARRATIVE IMPULSE 
Duke Ellington’s narrative impulse contributed in no small part to his mythical status in the American cultural imaginary. From the elaborate origin stories and evocative titles he crafted for the compositions credited to him, to the clever commentaries he constructed for concert stages and magazine pages, he demonstrated a clear and consistent need to tell the story of his musical work. Ellington’s careful design of these narrative frames reveal a desire not only to perform ideal representations for his audiences, but also to work through the complexities of his own lived experiences. Elevated to the impossible position of spokesperson for the Black race—on top of “genius composer”—he faced significant external and internal pressure to get the stories just right. While the scholarship devotes some attention to literature as a realm of influence to which Ellington returned repeatedly for his musical projects, comparatively little has been said about his own writerly ambitions and efforts. Invoking the work of Brett Hayes Edwards, this paper reads Music Is My Mistress as both an extra-musical platform through which Ellington performed compositional virtuosity and a striking experiment in vulnerability. Functionally read and understood as an autobiography, the book’s construction follows his characteristic resistance of easy categorization. Arranged into eight “acts” of multi-genred writing, Music Is My Mistress reveals a level of openness and honesty necessary for any such aesthetic endeavor. Even as Ellington imagined himself operating in ultimate narrative control, there are moments throughout the book which one imagines having escaped it—truths revealed which feel less heavily orchestrated and all the more resonant.

Nicole Higgins is a poet and PhD student in English at Duke University. Her research focuses on musical and sonic impulses in poetry, especially contemporary notions of the jazz poem and women’s articulations of generic conventions. She has received fellowships from Callalooand Cave Canem. Her creative work has appeared in Storyscape Journal, Sink Review, Vinyl, at the American Jazz Museum,and elsewhere.


4:15PM


Marilyn Lester
RIDING ON DUKE’S TRAIN: A JOURNEY FROM BOOK TO ANIMATED FILM
There’s no better way to map Duke’s world than by his own travels in the United States and beyond. This presentation details the journey of a book about Duke Ellington Riding on Duke’s Train, by Mick Carlon – from its book format to animated film. When Mick wrote the book about a young orphan boy in the South coming upon Duke Ellington’s train, and ultimately being adopted by Duke et al, he had the good fortune to create an enduring work that has itself traveled around the world, reaching an audience of enthusiastic readers far and wide. The book caught the attention of filmmaker Ken Kimmelman, who optioned Riding on Duke’s Trainto be made into an animated film. Ken and Mick adapted the book into a workable script, and then I was brought onto the project. I am a screenwriter in addition to other talents as a writer and producer. We three agreed it was important to keep creative control of the work. For the last half dozen years we’ve been seeking the funds necessary to make the film. This process has been slow, but headway has been made. Along the way the script has been submitted to a variety of national and international film festivals, winning or placing in every single one. This presentation details the process toward making the film. For those who aren’t familiar with this kind of creative process, the saga is something that should have everyone’s rapt attention. Just as Duke had his Irving Mills and the business of music to deal with, Ken, Mick and I have had to navigate the minefield the business side of movie-making!

Marilyn Lester left journalism and commercial writing behind nearly two decades ago to write plays. That branch in the road led to screenwriting, script-doctoring, dramaturgy and producing for the stage. Marilyn has also co-authored, as well as edited, books. It seemed the only world of words she hadn’t conquered was criticism, an opportunity that presented itself via Theater Pizzazz. Marilyn has since sought to widen her scope in this form of writing she especially relishes. Marilyn is a member of the Authors Guild, Dramatists Guild, Women in the Arts and Media and The League of Professional Theater Women. She is also the former Executive Director of the Duke Ellington Center for the Arts.

5:00-6:00PM BOOZE AND BOOKS 
  • Reception and Book Spotlight featuring Attendees’ Publications



6:00-7:00PM PERFORMANCE PRESENTATION

Steven Lasker
NEW DISCOVERIES
This “performance presentation” is devoted to recently-discovered/unreleased demo recordings for a show that opened on Broadway in 1946 as “Beggar’s Holiday.” There are 16 tracks in all, 13 titles, one breakdown, and two complete alternate takes. These are piano/vocal recordings. Duke is the pianist on all but two or three sides. Singers (never more than one per side) are Kay Davis, Marian Cox, Bill Dillard, and John Latouche. In addition to the music, this presentation will discuss the background behind the demo recordings (recorded by the Carnegie Hall Recording Co.), and present an unknown aircheck of “Never No Lament” from 1940 with spectacular performances from Johnny Hodges and Jimmie Blanton. The presentation will conclude by playing a record from 1960 – a pressed record with a printed label, not an aircheck – that has escaped the notice of Ellington discographers.    
Steven Lasker has collected, researched and written about Duke Ellington for many years. His “New Discoveries” presentations have been a popular feature at many past conferences.



Saturday, March 14
8:00AM           
  • REGISTRATION and coffee: Lohrfink Auditorium lobby (GU Hariri Building) 
9:00AM-12:30PM - SESSION IV
9:00AM
Michele Corcella
BLUES FOR NEW ORLEANS: THE LONG RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DUKE ELLINGTON AND THE “CRADLE OF JAZZ”
Duke Ellington had a special bond with New Orleans culminated in the composition of the famous “New Orleans Suite”. From the very beginning of his amazing career, Ellington has always loved to surround himself with musicians raised in “the cradle of jazz”.
This paper, designed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the “New Orleans Suite,” is based on Duke Ellington’s manuscripts and has two objectives: to show how every track has a specific link with the city and is deeply imbued with the traditional New Orleans music, and to stress how it was a revolutionary work and a milestone in orchestral jazz. The opening track (Blues for New Orleans) is based on the simplest blues chord progression but it’s probably one of the most experimental tunes of the 20th century for what concerns chromaticism and jazz orchestration. Due to his complex harmonies, Ellington has always been compared to European composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky. In this paper, however, I will show how Duke stretched tonality to its limits through a complete different way: the blues as a source of not-conventional harmonies. One of the most famous tune of the suite is certainly “Portrait of Mahalia Jackson”. Ellington paid homage to the queen of gospel music transforming the orchestra in a big pipe organ. In the paper, showing the manuscript and all the details for the copyist, I will show how Duke arrived to reach this goal.
Finally, explaining how the composer avoided to write many important details such as dynamics or articulations, I will talk about the fundamental role of the copyist, the relationship between the manuscripts and the recording, and the problems of interpretation of this repertoire for both college and professional big bands.

Michele Corcella is one of the most sought-after Italian jazz composers and arrangers. Besides winning many prizes in international composition competitions, he has arranged music played by David Liebman, Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor, Norma Winstone, WDR Big Band, Enrico Pieranunzi, Glauco Venier, Mario Brunello and many others. He was one of the speakers at the last three editions of the “Duke Ellington International Conference,” which took place in Amsterdam (2014), New York (2016), and Birmingham (2018). He’s currently teaching jazz composition at the “G.B. Martini” Conservatory in Bologna and “Adriano Buzzolla” Conservatory in Adria (Italy).


9:40AM

Tom Reney
ELLINGTON’S NEW ENGLAND
Tom Reney is a writer and the longtime host of Jazz à la Mode at New England Public Radio. In 2019, he was named the winner of the Marian McPartland-Willis Conover Award for Career Excellence in Broadcasting. He's lectured extensively on jazz and occasionally teaches courses in jazz history at UMass-Amherst and Mt. Holyoke College.

10:20AM

Darren LaCour
PERFORMING PLACE: THE GOUTELAS SUITEAND THE UWIS SUITE
Many of Ellington’s extended works invoke places, such as the Liberian Suite, The Deep South Suite, Harlem, The Far East Suite, The New Orleans Suite, and The Latin American Suite. While the historical circumstances and resonances of those works have been treated more extensively, the events surrounding The Goutelas Suite and The UWIS Suite (two late-career suites, commercially released posthumously on 1976’s The Ellington Suites) remain obscure outside of what Ellington presents in his autobiography. The Goutelas Suite celebrates a restored chateau in the south of France where Ellington was hosted and honored in February 1966, an event that all evidence suggests had a profound and lasting impact on the composer. The UWIS Suite was written for the final concert of The Ellington Festival at the University of Wisconsin– Madison in 1972. Only Ellington had any personal encounter with Goutelas, while the full orchestra had personal experiences with the University of Wisconsin–Madison due to their week- long residency. In this paper, I contend that these separate experiences of place aurally manifest in a live recording of the two works made at the conclusion to the band’s residency at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The experience of place provides a way to view these two suites as collaborative products: the individual voices of the Ellington Orchestra have something personal to add to The UWIS Suite, while Ellington has to lead them through The Goutelas Suite. For these reasons, the orchestra provides a more powerful performance of The UWIS Suite in the live recording, but we can also hear that echo of that personal investment in the later studio renditions.

Darren LaCour teaches music theory at Lindenwood University, a small liberal-arts college west of St. Louis, MO. His writes on the music of Duke Ellington, blending close analytic discussion with critical investigations of race and culture. Dr. LaCour has presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for American Music. He received a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2016. In the long term, Dr. LaCour hopes to broaden the scope of the academic music curriculum, envisioning a “music theory” that considers loops and modular composition alongside discussions of voice-leading and modulation.

11:00AM - BREAK
11:10AM
Bill Egan
DUKE ELLINGTON IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND IN 1970 AND 1972
Duke Ellington arrived in the Australasian region only a few years before his death. However, he had exerted a major influence through records, in film, and on radio, for many years before he finally arrived in 1970. This awareness, triggered initially by the arrival in 1931 of the stereotypical Amos ‘n’ Andy movie, Check and Double Check, saw his music regularly broadcast, and enthusiastically embraced by local jazz musicians. Drawing on years of research into the broad world of black entertainment, and more recently specializing in the Australasian region my presentation will offer a summary of the Ellingtonian presence in the region before Duke’s own arrival and give an overview of the band’s itinerary, covering four Australian and two New Zealand cities. This will include repertoire, personnel and related issues, as well as discussion of a mystery related to the composition Black Butterfly. A sample of music from one of the New Zealand concerts will also be presented.

Bill Egan, M. Sc. (Econ), is an Irish-born (1937) Australian-resident independent researcher with a lifelong interest in jazz and African American culture. He is the author of Florence Mills: Harlem Jazz Queen(Scarecrow Press, 2004), and he contributed many entries to the Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present (OUP) and the Encyclopedia of The Harlem Renaissance(Routledge). His new book African American Entertainers in Australia and New Zealand: A History, 1788–1941will appear soon with McFarland Press. A long-term member of TDES (New York), he has attended several Duke Ellington International Conferences.

11:50AM

Bill Saxonis
ELLINGTON AND CIVIL RIGHTS: A DELICATE BALANCE
This presentation builds upon my earlier research targeting Ellington’s role in civil rights in the United States by spotlighting the challenges Ellington faced as a Black celebrity and role model during a period of rampart racism often imbedded both in social custom and law.  Ellington’s challenge demanded a delicate balance to champion civil rights while avoiding hazards that could send his career and public standing into an irreversible tailspin. Ellington would successfully meet the challenge.
            When discussing his 1941 anti-Jim Crow musical Jump for Joy, Ellington acknowledged that, from a political perspective, the racial climate would require a “real craftsman” to pull off the controversial production.  Ellington’s perception was correct for many reasons including the Glendale, California Klux Klan creating an atmosphere of violence that threatened the show’s opening. (Jump for Joywas performed at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles for 11 weeks, 101 performances.)
            Like 1941, the year 1943 was also filled with racial tensions as Black Americans were asked to fight and die for their country in World War II, but often treated as second class citizens. Major federal civil rights legislation was still over 20 years away. In June 1943, Detroit experienced a race riot which was met by the arrival of 6,000 army troops in tanks armed with automatic weapons. Nine whites and twenty-five Black Americans died, and an estimated 700 people were injured. Nationally, in 1943 18 Black Americans were lynched.
Arguably 1943 presented a difficult environment to musically celebrate Black American history. Yet in 1943 Ellington presented his 45-minute, three movement suite, Black Brown and Beige, A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negroat one of the world’s most prestigious venues, Carnegie Hall.  At the time, the music received mixed reviews, but history has since proven, both the event and the music, to be significant milestones. Many now consider Black Brown and Beigea masterpiece.

Bill Saxonis has a passion for music, devoting over 35 years to studying the life, times and music of Duke Ellington. He has contributed to jazz publications and prestigious forums in both Europe and the United States. Speaking appearances include the Institute for Jazz Studies (Rutgers University, Newark NJ), the University of Texas (Austin), Ellington 2008and Ellington 2012 in the UK, Ellington 2014 (Amsterdam), Ellington 2016 (New York City) and the New York State Library (Albany NY, 2019).  For the past 19 years, Bill has presented to a worldwide audience an acclaimed annual four-hour radio show celebrating the birthday of Duke Ellington (WCDB-90.9 FM). In addition to Bill’s passion for music, he is a nationally recognized expert on issues related to the regulation of the electric and gas utility industry and assessing programs designed to reduce energy consumption and pollution. Currently, Bill is an adjunct professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy.


12:30PM - LUNCH BREAK
1:45PM

Thomas Brothers
DUKE ELLINGTON, A COLLABORATIVE GENIUS
Ranking high among Duke Ellington’s many talents was his ability to sustain a collaborative approach to composition over many years, with many different musicians, using many methods. This talk reviews this multifaceted phenomenon while arguing that creative collaboration provides the best way to understand the Ellington achievement. 

3:30-5:00PM - SESSION V
3:30PM

Adrian Oud & Louis Tavecchio
GETTING CLOSER TO DUKE
One of the fascinating aspects of recording a jazz session is the choice of the master take and the alternate take(s). The master take will make it to record and is considered to be the most successful representation of the ideas and intentions of the musicians, and the best performance. We would like to dwell at greater length on the matter by bringing it up as an interesting subject for debate. Or, to put it more formally, what is going on during the decision-making process of choosing between several different takes of a certain number? Is there a specific method of working / a procedure? Is it possible to discern a pattern, what are characteristic aspects and/or determining factors in the final choice?
As an important and inspiring source, we used, among others, the five volumes in the Duke Ellington World Broadcasting Series (1943 & 1945), issued by Circle Records. We arrived at some tentative conclusions which are, of course, open to debate. We will present our ideas in the form of an interactive session, in which we invite the conference attendees to participate and give their opinion

Adrian (Ad) Oud is a retired psychotherapist, living in Amsterdam. He is also a musician, who has been playing piano and tenor saxophone since age 19. An Ellington aficionado in my teens, I was privileged to be in audience when Duke played in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the sixties. As leader and soloist of a jazz quartet, I love to play and improvise on Ellington repertoire. Being a member of the Dutch chapter of the Duke Ellington Society, I spend much time studying, reading and conducting research on Duke’s works, mostly together with Louis Tavecchio, my best friend since university.

Louis Tavecchio is a Psychologist, PhD, Professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam. As for the ‘Ellington connection’, he was the initiator and co-organizer – with Walter van de Leur – of the 22nd Duke Ellington Study Group Conference at the Conservatory of Amsterdam in May 2014. Since February 2015, he has produced more than 100 1-hour Ellington programs, broadcast by the Dutch ‘Concertzender’ (Concert Channel). All parts in the series have been stored, so they can be listened to at any time.  Tavecchio was fortunate enough to have attended Duke’s concerts in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, The Netherlands. As a member of the Dutch chapter of the DE Society, he spends much time reading and doing research on Duke’s music, mostly together with Ad Oud, my musical ‘compass’, and very good and dear friend since university.


4:15PM

David Palmquist
WHEN WALLA WALLA WENT WILD: ON THE ROAD WITH DUKE ELLINGTON
In collaboration with Steven Lasker and Ken Steiner, both well-known researchers of Ellington’s life and music, I have devoted the last seven years to documenting Ellington’s working life and publishing the results on http://tdwaw.ca (“The Duke - Where and When”). Knowing Duke’s day to day working environment and tracking his experiences, leads to a deeper understanding of the man and his music. There are many road tours I could discuss.  For this talk, I will focus on Ellington’s marathon 1951/1952 road tour, including The Biggest Show of ’51 and in the spring of 1952 (March through June), when Walla Walla  “went wild.” 
An amateur reed player, David plays in two concert bands and once a month rehearses with his Strictly Ellington rehearsal band, which he formed in 2002.  Since retiring from Canada  Revenue Agency, David has devoted his time to  chronicling Duke Ellington’s working life, expanding the body of knowledge developed by his colleagues and predecessors, as a resource for biographers, musicologists, and anyone who just wants to know more about Ellington.  As a youngster, he enjoyed playing a medley of Ellington’s music in a city-wide youth band.  Later, he was taken by the “Blue Reverie” track on the Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall album, featuring Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney and Cootie Williams and by the LPs of the “Second Sacred Concert” and “My People.”  His life changed on the way home from work one night, when he heard Ellington’s “Daybreak Express” on the CBC and immediately started buying Ellington compact discs.
6:00PM

Antony Pepper
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: MAPPING ELLINGTON’S FUTURE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Antony Pepper is a photographer based in South East England who joined DESUK at Ellington '97 in Leeds and has attended all the Study Group conferences since. He's served on the DESUK committee for 15 years and was lead organiser in London for Ellington 2008 and daytime programmer of Woking's Ellington 2012.

Michael Kilpatrick
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: MAPPING ELLINGTON’S FUTURE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Michael Kilpatrick is the musical director of Harmony In Harlem, a 17-piece jazz orchestra, dedicated to the music of Duke Ellington. He has been attending the Ellington Study Group conferences since 1997. And he has contributed to the performance of Ellington’s work through his meticulous creation of countless performance scores of Ellington/Strayhorn compositions. Kilpatrick has also assisted Identifying a number of untitled and previously unidentified Ellington/Strayhorn manuscripts in the Smithsonian’s collection.  

Sunny Sumter
SATURDAY ROUNDTABLE
Sunny Sumter is Executive Director of the DC Jazz Festival, a nonprofit service organization established in 2004 to present jazz-related cultural and educational programs in the nation’s capital. Its’ signature programs are the annual DC JazzFest held each June, the year-round DC Jazz Festival Education Program; and the Charles Fishman Embassy Series. DC Jazz Festival is the recipient of the 2018 DC Mayor’s Art Award for Excellence in Creative Industries. Sumter has raised over $14 million dollars for the DC Jazz Festival and has participated as a panelist in discussions on jazz funding at the WeDC JazzFest, Jazz Philadelphia Summit, and the U.S. Department of State.  Prior to her tenure at the DC Jazz Festival, Sumter held management/director positions with the Aspen Institute, National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. 
Sumter earned her bachelor’s degree in music business from Howard University where she minored in jazz voice. She is a recipient of a Howard University Benny Golson Award, the 2018 Sitar Arts Center Visionary Award, a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship, and a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award.  As a professional vocalist, Sumter has performed at some of the finest festivals, performance venues, and clubs in the U.S. and internationally. Sumter was awarded the Aspen Institute’s Staff Achievement Award for Excellence.  She was host of Jazz Central on the BETJ network. She is a member of Americans for the Arts, National Academy for the Recording Arts and Sciences, the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative; and served as a program director member of the National Collaboration for Youth.



Sunday, March 15

 

  11:00AM-12:30PM - CLOSING CONCERT

Duke Ellington’s Songs for Sacred Concerts featuring two outstanding youth ensembles: The Mellow Tones and the Blues Alley Youth Orchestra
  • Gaston Hall (3rd floor Healy Building), Georgetown University
























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Tuesday, 10 March 2020

Ellington 2020: Day One


Tomorrow is the first day of Mapping Duke Ellington's World, the 26th International Duke Ellington Study Group Conference.

We wish the conference every success and while we cannot be in attendance, villes ville will post details from the Ellington 2020 conference every evening this week, for the record, prior to the next day's activities.

The 26th International Duke Ellington Study Group Conference will take place at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., from March 11-15, 2020. 


This five-day multidisciplinary conference will bring together leading researchers and performers across the arts and humanities. The event will feature academic papers, panels, roundtables, and cultural walks/visits, as well as an exciting program of performances by local D.C. performers.

MAPPING DUKE ELLINGTON’S WORLD
The theme for this year’s conference is Mapping Duke Ellington’s World. This theme is broadly conceived and can include presentations and performances on a range of topics, including Ellington’s travels/tours, Ellington’s collaborators, Ellington collections/archives around the world, transcription as a form of musical mapping, and more.

Agenda

The 26th International Duke Ellington Study Group Conference begins on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 and will continue through Sunday, March 15, 2020. 

Please click the dates below to jump to specific events for that day, or scroll below for the complete agenda.


WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2020

THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2020

FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2020

SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2020

SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 2020



A map of Leavey Conference Center 

click here to download (PDF).



Wednesday, March 11

3:00-5:00PM

  • REGISTRATION: GU Conference Center Hotel Lobby

6:00-9:30PM  

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Monday, 9 March 2020

The Seventies: River Sides...


Part 2 of Stanley Slome's essay on The River. Here is a discography of recordings of the work with some updated comments of my own in blue...

 The Recordings

DUKE ELLINGTON: THE PRIVATE COLLECTION Volume V 
The River here includes all the sections of the ballet.  We hear Duke's band charts for The Run, The Neo-Hip-Hot Kiddies Community and Her Majesty the Sea, which Alvin Ailey didn't get around to choreographing.  There is some evidence that Collier orchestrated these because of Newsweek's Saal's reference to the "50-minute" score reaching Ailey and by a Collier remark in Toronto that seven movements were recorded but that there were more that were written.  

If a completer orchestration of The River exists, then Schirmer's Music Publishing Company may have it.  Stanley Dance wrote me that "Mercer did a deal with them for the long works." But all we have of the missing music is what is on Duke's band charts.   

Except for Neo-Hip-Hot, a hard-driving swinger that cuts short at 1:45,each section sounds like a complete entity that can stand on its own. I find it incomprehensible as to why Ron Collier views Lake with embarrassment.   It is sensual and has a strong Near Eastern sound.  Noteworthy is the interplay of flute and bass,and handing of the main theme from clarinet to trumpet to flute. Whirlpool (Vortex) contains scintillating percussion effects. River (Riba),a concept of Mercer's, is exciting mainstream jazz.   If you listen closely to the band in full hue and cry, you will hear the appreciative hand claps of Duke himself punctuating the rhythms.

The most poignant section is the spiritual-influenced The Village of the Virgins.  The Falls  finds Duke in, rhythmically, his driving, steam locomotive mode.   Of the sections that didn't make to the ballet, The Run was the most effective with its mixture of a skipping, soft-shoe dance theme and a waltz.  

Forget Ron Collier's griping.  This is good Ellington.

DUKE ELLINGTON: THE THREE BLACK KINGS.
PREMIERE RECORDING
The Duke Ellington Orchestra with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mercer Ellington
(Frogbox TFB 100/2) NA










A 2-LP set of a live performance in Warsaw in 1980.  The River does not get top billing on the front cover, of course, but its title is on the back cover,along with New World A-Coming.  If you wanted to have an idea of what the ballet might have sounded like if Ellington's men had joined forces with a small symphony orchestra in the pit that June evening in 1970, this is the recording to have.  High point of the eight sections is Village of the Virgins, with its penetrating chorale treatment in the brass and a wah-wah mute trumpet solo by an unidentified player. Spring has a pronounced Near Eastern sound.  Mercer conducts with vigor and flexible inflections.  Riba, which Mercer says in the liner notes that his dad borrowed from, is a roaring, wailing, romping swinger and the Polish musicians respond well.  Sonically,the performance details are often clouded over by the circumstances of a live recording.  A digitally remastered CD re-release is in order.   

 A CD has, in fact, been produced since Stanley wrote his article. It is, in fact, simply a needle drop on the dreadful label Squatty Roo Records. The 'album' is available on this form on Spotify ...


Better still, why not watch the whole performance, courtesy of You Tube. it is a remarkable concert...
DUKE ELLINGTON: SUITE FROM THE RIVER
TOSHIRO MAYUZUMI: ESSAY FOR STRING ORCHESTRA
The Louisville Orchestra conducted by Akira Endo
(Louisville Orchestra LS (LP) 777 NA

A 1983 recording.  No Ellington men but the Louisvillians offer a lot of good things here, aided by far better sound than Mercer got.  Meander is effective with its swaggering Slaughter on Tenth Avenue-like theme with "shake' trumpets.   The Village of the Virgins has a haunting, bluesy sound. Giggling Rapids is decidedly boppish and did I detect a coy quote from the old Woody Woodpecker cartoon theme? Falls with a full symphony orchestra in force gives a good impression of an onrushing train, complete with horn calls.

 This recording is also available now digitally as a download or on Spotify...

 DUKE ELLINGTON: SUITE FROM THE RIVER; HARLEM; SOLITUDE
WILLIAM LEVI DAWSON: NEGRO FOLK SYMPHONY
Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi
(CHAN 9909 CD)


Recorded 29 September and 3 October, 1992.  As he did with Harlem, Jarvi and the Detroiters come through for Duke although the suite is reduced to seven sections with the omission of Falls.  Since the entire CD goes only 51:08, Falls could have been put in. Aided by great engineering in an acoustically friendly venue in Detroit Symphony Orchestra Hall, Jarvi conducts dynamically with impeccable phrasing.  On Spring, note how he builds to a climax with the cymbal crash.   Ron Collier should be proud of Jarvi and his men in Lake. More than Mercer or Endo, they convey a longing, sensuous atmosphere.  In comparison this interpretation makes the other orchestral efforts sound like the plush mood music recordings of the Fifties and Sixties.  Vortex with its percussion effects has tension and power.  It seems evident that Duke and Collier did a lot of listening to Stravinsky and maybe to Varese along the way with perhaps some Sauter-Finegan thrown in.  By the way, Ron Collier on the back of the CD, gets credit as orchestrator.  He did say in Toronto that he was unaware of the CD until someone brought his attention to it.  Only psychic income there.   Maybe some day we'll get to hear all of his orchestration of The River.  

 ... and finally, one recording which was not available when Stanley Slome wrote his article...

 TONY OVERWATER TRIO & CALEFAX REED QUINTET
ELLINGTON SUITES: FAR EAST SUITE AND THE RIVER
(JAZZ IN MOTION JIM 75219 CD)

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Sunday, 8 March 2020

The Seventies: Tracing the source of The River


In our continuing journey through 1970, 9 March was the first time Ellington took his work into the studio, New York City, for The River: the blueprint of a score for a ballet to be choreographed by Alvin Ailey.All of the titles of that first session remain unreleased. Piano sketches and a version of the suite have been released subsequently. Check out Ellington Live's Twitter feed for a link to a playlist of these, The Source of The River, on Spotify.

 In celebration of this major late period Ellington work, I have reproduced here an article on The River by Stanley Slome of the Southern California chapter of the Duke Ellington Society. I will publish Stanley's discography of versions of this work (updated) in a subsequent post. No infringement of copyright is intended. The original publication online of the article is here...
Source:
The River by Stanley Slome

Clive Barnes of the New York Times was ecstatic in his review of the Duke Ellington-Alvin Alley ballet The River, making its world premiere June 25,1970 at Lincoln Center's New York State Theater. 

"The piece is not finished, but it is a delight," he wrote.    "It is the most considerable piece from Mr. Ellington since his Black, Brown and Beige suite;  it is quite lovely.  And Mr. Ailey has never previously created with such power and force for a classic troupe. "At the moment we have only seven dances from a prologue, an epilogue and 11 sections... It is already a major work, complete in itself..." 

Due note of The River's incompleteness (it was actually announced on the program as Seven Dances From a Work in Progress Entitled 'The River') was made by Hubert Saal in the July 6 Newsweek, combining a detailed review with an Ailey interview.

"But the fact that the work looked and sounded incomplete and fragmented only served to suggest how coherent the finished work would be," Saal wrote.  "The separate parts could not be shifted around or omitted.   At the same time, what there was provided its own satisfactions."

The River's incompleteness does not challenge the musical worth of Duke's score, but it may call into question Ellington's working methods in adapting his music to a full-length ballet, as we shall see. 

The original idea for The River was not Duke's.   As Mercer Ellington explained in Duke Ellington in Person, friend-confidante Stanley Dance had suggested Duke compose an extended work to depict the natural course of a river.   Dance had in mind the Mississippi and wrote a description of it from source to sea.  Billy Strayhorn liked it and there was often talk about it.    

In a letter to me Dance wrote:

"I had no thought of symphonic treatment, but suggested it as an idea for an LP theme, thinking in terms of the band and a climactic affair like Ravel's Bolero."

But by 1970 Duke's mind was turning more toward spiritual values and so Dance's description was transfigured by Duke into a form of religious allegory dealing with the cycle of birth and rebirth.   At any rate Duke apparently decided that The River might become a ballet.  And it would appear that Alvin Ailey was the choreographer he wanted. 

"As I remember, Ailey's first work with Duke had been a very successful version of Night Creature, Dance told me.   "It was on television with Gladys Knight and The Pips.   That was Duke's first ballet." 

In his 1995 autobiography Revelations, Ailey, who died not long ago, recalled the words of Lucia Chase, director of the American Ballet Theater:

"Alvin, I've got a ballet for you to make. You and Duke Ellington.  We've got to have the two of you."

So Chase put Ailey on a plane to Vancouver to meet Duke.   After Duke's show ended at 1:30 in the morning, according to Ailey, Duke invited him up to his room.   Along the way, Duke talked about his dislike of idea of his birthday party at the White House because he didn't want people thinking of him as being 70 years old.   Duke offered him a choice of alcoholic beverages from the small liquor bottles he had.   Duke didn't touch the stuff himself but had them on hand for guests.   Ailey declined.   Then it was on to musical matters with Duke playing selections from The River on the portable piano he kept at the foot of his hotel bed and with Ailey agreeing to collaborate on a ballet of the music.   They were up all night until it was time for Duke to fly to Los Angeles.    

That's not exactly what happened, Dance told me.  "At his request for something new, Duke offered him The River or, I think, Queenie Pie, neither of which was then beyond the thinking stage," he said. 

"Later," wrote Saal in Newsweek,"Ailey flew to meet Ellington in Toronto.   "He had all the water music there - the scores and the records of Debussy's La Mer, Britten's Peter Grimes, Smetana's Moldau, Handel's Water Music - everybody. He'd call me at 5 a.m. and say:`Did I wake you, Alvin?'  I'd say,`No Duke,'and he'd say, laughing,`Come on over, I've got something for you to hear.' Did he ever."

With the American Ballet Theater commission in hand, Duke assigned Ron Collier to orchestrate The River.  Collier had previously orchestrated Duke's Celebration for the anniversary of the Jacksonville Symphony.  "The orchestration was for the kind of small symphony orchestra used at most major ballet performances," Dance told me. 

On a tape supplied to me by DES-Southern California chapter President Bill Hill, Collier told the Ellington '96 Conference in Toronto of his working with Duke on The River:

"I had to orchestrate from the band charts.   For most of the pieces he would write them out because the choreographer needed pieces of music so that he could work with the dancers; and, instead of Duke writing out a piano piece, he would write out a chart for the band, tape the chart for the band, send it on to Alvin Ailey and that's what they would use to work with."

Except in one case, as Collier tells it.

"Anyways he gave me one piece.   It was called Lake and it was up in his room(I had dinner at his place.)   Just a little piece of sheet music, single-line chord changes and he said, `This is a pas de deux,two dancers.'    I said,`What would you like me to do with it?'  He says,`Well,  you know what to do with it.'  You know, it's almost seven minutes long on the tape but that's all the instructions: `You know what to do with it.  So I went home and it sat on the brief case.'
Not long afterward, Collier said, he got a call from Duke that the band would be recording "Lake" the next day.   He said he stayed up all night to do it with fellow arranger Joe Benjamin helping with the copying, doing it for a small orchestra. 

"That was just to be a guide track for a choreographer," Collier said.   He then launched an attack on what has to be the release of Volume 5 of The Private Collection: The Suites (LMR CD 83004) containing The Degas Suite along with The River. 

"I got a beef here.  Mercer (Ellington) released this," he told his Toronto audience.  "I'm sure if Duke were alive, he would never have released this,f or they (The River numbers) were really very rough and their function was not to be a commercial record.  They were to be for the choreographer, not written to be band pieces or for a symphony orchestra.  I'm embarrassed when I hear this Lake because it was a rough job.   No semblance with what I did with a symphony orchestra.   " 

I'll have a Stanley Dance defence of that CD release later on but there may be an explanation for Duke's strange departure from his working procedure accounting for his vague "instructions" to Collier on the Lake.  According to Stanley Dance's logs, that full-band session was May 25, 1970, at Universal Recording Studios when the band was in Chicago - only a month away from the New York world premiere of The River.  Another Dance log entry discloses that on May 11 at National NBC Duke recorded a piano solo of Lake as well as six other numbers for The River. In a letter to me, Dance wrote "I remember going with Duke when he took him the piano solos.  These were intended to give him some preliminary guidance as to what was coming." 

Assuming, of course, that everyone's memories of important events is accurate, could it be that Duke turned over his piano solo recording to Alvin Ailey before his session with Collier? Collier makes no mention of a Duke piano solo of Lake recording to play for Collier? Well,the rejoinder might be: Duke could have played the "Lake" on his portable piano in his hotel room.  He did not.   He could easily have done so, but would it have been the same solo Ailey would have been working from as a guide for the dancers?  It should be pointed out that Duke was with his band in the studios recording The River along with doing his band tours.  The pressures on everyone had to be horrendous.

In his autobiography Ailey spoke of his frustration trying to choreograph The River.  He complained that Duke was sending him often only a page at a time of the score, sometimes only with 16 bars. "I can't work that way," he wrote.   But in June 1970--and with Duke very much alive--Ailey was more conciliatory. Wrote Saal of Newsweek: "When the 50-minute score reached Ailey he couldn't find time to choreograph more than half.  `The Duke said to me,' says Ailey, If you did more choreography and less worrying about my composing the music, you'd be better off.`   He was right.'" 

Stanley Dance wrote me that "I don't think Duke saw any rehearsals of The River, and the music was probably delivered late, so that Ailey possibly had too little rehearsal time."  Duke never saw the ballet.  He was at the Grand Park Music Shell with his band on June 25.  Ailey in his autobiography, said he put on The River in 1976 and by then, of course, Duke was gone.  Ron Collier said in Toronto he never saw the ballet either, but Newsweek's Hubert Saal did and his account of that night in 1970 is far more revealing about The River than Clive Barnes' in the New York Times and is worth quoting in part:

"Ellington's score is a tone poem, a suite that traces the meandering river's course and speed from birth as a spring, through rapids, over falls, spinning into whirlpools, subsiding into lakes, passing by cities, ending in the sea.   It is a musical allegory in the course of which the river from spring to sea parallels the course of life from birth to death, a cycle, according to Ellington, of 'heavenly anticipation of rebirth.'  The music is itself like a river, constantly flowing, changing speed and shape, instantly accessible melodically.  Ellington parades it all from the slow, folk-song opening Spring through the jazzy swingtime Vortex to the spiritual and blues of  Two Cities."

Once Ailey got over his evident hero worship and stopped making dance the handmaiden of music, the choreography was magnificent.   If the Spring section obeyed too slavishly the dictates of the music, he got into his own thing in Vortex - a nonstop, whirling, leaping, twisting solo danced like a tireless naiad by Eleanor D`Agostino.

"Whatever the section, for one dancer or fifteen, in Falls or Lake, the Ailey choreography, like Proteus himself, took on the physical shape and dynamics of the setting.   He turned Riba (Mainstream) into a great joke, high-style burlesque, putting white dancers through Cotton Club routines, doing a jazz parody of the four little Swanlets in Swan Lake and turning the male chorus into a bunch of high-kicking Rockettes."

Blues: He saved the last for best.

In Two Cities, a white girl (Sallie Wilson) and a black boy (Keith Lee), each bathed in a spotlight, dance a blues adagio, expressing yearning and loneliness. Gradually the spotlights unite them, and their pas de deux, touching in the complexity of intertwined limbs and intricate lifts, makes a wordless comment that lays waste racial distinctions."

In 1987 when Volume 5 of The Private Collection was released Stanley Dance wrote the liner notes for The River.  He seems to have anticipated the objections of Ron Collier to the release of the band charts. He wrote:

"None of these were intended for release, but today they are the equivalent of a great artist's sketchbooks, and as such are presented here.  They were, to his mind,the blueprints on which the orchestrations for the ballet company's own orchestra would ultimately be built.  Eventually, too, the fully-fleshed work was recorded by Mercer Ellington with the band and the Warsaw Symphony in Poland, and then by the Louisville Symphony Orchestra in this country."

Dance,who admits he lacks interest in the "symphonic" Ellington, told me that another reason for the release was that The River as performed by Ellington and his men would have greater attraction than Ellington by another orchestra - even if Duke intended it that way.

"A jazz orchestra version of The River by Wynton Marsalis would be far more interesting to me than any further symphonic version," he wrote.   He agreed with my viewpoint that he "would be glad to see it added to symphonic repertoires even in the existing form."


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Saturday, 7 March 2020

Uptown Download




blue engine records releases black, brown and beige


A DEFINITIVE RECORDING OF DUKE ELLINGTON’S MASTERWORK 
BY THE JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER ORCHESTRA WITH WYNTON MARSALIS 
 Blue Engine Records’ first release dedicated entirely to Ellington

Available on all digital platforms March 6,2020
New York, NY (March 2, 2020) – Blue Engine Records,Jazz at Lincoln Center’s in-house recording label, will release a present-day recording of Duke Ellington’s groundbreaking masterpiece Black, Brown and Beige by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Captured during a live, Rose Theater performance in 2018, Black, Brown and Beige is Wynton Marsalis’s first recording of the work and Blue Engine’s first release dedicated entirely to Ellington. Black, Brown and Beige will be available exclusively on all digital platforms on March 6, 2020.



Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis explains, “Black, Brown and Beige sits alone in the history of jazz. It covers a mosaic of not just Afro-American but of American styles of music.” The expert musicians of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, alongside special guests Brianna Thomas (vocals) and Eli Bishop (violin), are perfectly equipped to tackle its stirring stylistic breadth. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s spirited take on Ellington’s epic work pays tribute to some of the maestro’s most personal work while adding another important chapter to its enduring legacy.



 Since its 1943 debut at Carnegie Hall, the piece—a sprawling survey of African American history—has been heralded as one of the most significant compositions in American orchestral music. Now, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis is releasing a definitive, present-day recording of Black, Brown and Beige that conveys all the nuances and emotion of Ellington’s grandest work.

TRACK LISTING
I. Black
1. Work Song
Solos: Paul Nedzela (baritone saxophone), Kenny Rampton (trumpet), Sam Chess (trombone), Sherman Irby (alto saxophone)
2. Come Sunday
Solos: Elliot Mason (trombone), Kasperi Sarikoski (trombone), Ted Nash (alto saxophone), Eli Bishop (violin), Dan Nimmer (piano), Sherman Irby (alto saxophone)
3. Light
Solos: Marcus Printup (trumpet), Wynton Marsalis (trumpet), Carlos Henriquez (bass), Elliot Mason (trombone), Paul Nedzela (baritone saxophone)
II. Brown
4. West Indian Dance
Solos: Marion Felder (drums), Victor Goines (clarinet), Elliot Mason (trombone), Kenny Rampton (trumpet), Wynton Marsalis (trumpet), Paul Nedzela (baritone saxophone)
5. Emancipation Celebration
Solos: Wynton Marsalis (trumpet), Sam Chess (trombone), Carlos Henriquez (bass), Dan Nimmer (piano)
6. Blues Theme Mauve
Solo: Julian Lee (tenor saxophone)
III. Beige
7. Various Themes
Solos: Dan Nimmer (piano), Kenny Rampton (trumpet), Elliot Mason (trombone), Julian Lee (tenor saxophone)
8. Sugar Hill Penthouse
Solos: Dan Nimmer (piano), Paul Nedzela (baritone saxophone), Julian Lee (tenor saxophone)
9. Finale
Solos: Dan Nimmer (piano), Sherman Irby (alto saxophone), Marcus Printrup (trumpet), Ryan Kisor (trumpet)
PERSONNEL:
THE JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER ORCHESTRA WITH WYNTON MARSALIS
2017-18 Concert Season
REEDS
Sherman Irby (alto saxophone)
Ted Nash (alto saxophone)
Victor Goines (tenor saxophone, clarinet)
Walter Blanding* (tenor saxophone)
Julian Lee (substitute for Walter Blanding)
Paul Nedzela (baritone saxophone)
TRUMPETS
Ryan Kisor
Marcus Printup
Kenny Rampton
Wynton Marsalis (music director)
Jonah Moss
TROMBONES
Vincent Gardner*
Chris Crenshaw*
Elliot Mason
Kasperi Sarikoski (substitute for Vincent Gardner)
Sam Chess (substitute for Chris Crenshaw)
RHYTHM SECTION
Dan Nimmer (piano, bells)
Carlos Henriquez (bass)
Marion Felder (drums)
James Chirillo (guitar)
Conductor:
Chris Crenshaw
Special Guests:
Eli Bishop (violin)
Brianna Thomas (vocals)
*Did not perform at this concert
About Blue Engine RecordsBlue Engine Records, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s platform that makes its vast archive of recorded concerts available to jazz audiences everywhere, launched on June 30, 2015. Blue Engine Records releases new studio and live recordings as well as archival recordings from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s performance history that date back to 1987 and are part of the R. Theodore Ammon Archives and Music Library. Since the institution’s founding in 1987, each year’s programming is conceived and developed by Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis with a vision toward building a comprehensive library of iconic and wide-ranging compositions that, taken together, make up a canon of music. These archives include accurate, complete charts for the compositions – both old and new – performed each season. Coupled with consistently well-executed and recorded music performed by Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, this archive has grown to include thousands of songs from hundreds of concert dates. The launch of Blue Engine is aligned with Jazz at Lincoln Center’s efforts to cultivate existing jazz fans worldwide and turn new audiences on to jazz. For more information on Blue Engine Records, visit www.jazz.org/blueengine

Press Inquiries:Madelyn Gardner
Manager, Public Relations & External Communications
Jazz at Lincoln Center
mgardner@jazz.org
212-258-9868

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