Duke Ellington

brad c with the sick burn

Megalol @ that not influential bs

The pr hype for the book says on the longlist for the 2013 National Book Award for nonfiction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uiAN4_8ihw

On the Money Jungle tip, here's Ellington playing Fleurette Africain solo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW-0K58pwII

reading the teachout book now -- lots of good stuff in it for sure, but yeah, he does have some fairly wacky ideas about ellington's music and influence. and he gets pretty judgy mcjudgerson about ellington's personal life.

Spoiler alert -- You might not want to read the below if you're gonna see "American Hustle"...

In a pivotal scene in "American Hustle," Christian Bale's character is drawn to Amy Adams' character and her charm bracelet depicting Duke Ellington.

During a lavish pool party, Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) locks eyes with Sydney Prosser (Adams) from across the room. Rosenfeld approaches Prosser and as she reaches for a plate of vegetables, he grabs her arm.

"Is that Duke Ellington on your bracelet?" Rosenfeld asks.

"As a matter of fact it is. He died this year, ya know?" Prosser responds.

"I know. I doubt anyone else here knows or cares about it," he said.

"Well, I care about it. He's saved my life many times," she said.

"Mine too. Which one?"

"Jeep's Blues," she said.

Rosenfeld, a con man, then invites Prosser to hear the album. The meeting sparks a partnership and romance that is key to the plot of the David O' Russell-directed film, which was released last week and is picking up a lot of awards season buzz.

http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2013/12/american_hustle_uses_charm_bra.html

Ha, that was one of the few bright spots in the film for me.

Ethan Iverson has posted a pair of pieces on Teachout and his book on Do The Math:
An interview with Teachout
and
Reverential Gesture: "A personal celebration of Duke Ellington that disagrees with some of the musical analysis in Teachout's biography."

thanks, those are both great

Ellington is a huge yawning gulf in my listening. The only stuff I have in my iPod is Blues in Orbit, Money Jungle, and the 3CD box Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band. (I have Black, Brown & Beige and Newport 1956 on CD at home, too.) All of it's fantastic, of course, but I really have no idea where to go next. It's not like there's bad Ellington, I'm sure, but I wish his discography wasn't quite so massive, so I could get a grip on it with a four- or five-CD box or two.

this is actually the thing that got me way into ellington way back when: http://www.propermusic.com/product-details/Duke-Ellington-Masterpieces-1926-1949-4CD-10468
4 discs covering 1926-1949. i'm sure that because it's on a cheapo euro label, there might be better sounding versions of this material out there, but I really enjoy it.

Pretty fascinating footage here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q9rI39JcM0

if you're down with the blanton-webster band, then you might find a set like this useful for filling out your picture of ellington:

Early Ellington: The Complete Brunswick and Vocalion Recordings of Duke Ellington, 1926-1931

there's something about the sounds here. like, that people were doing that, then.

I haven't heard that one, but I love The OKeh Ellington (an insanely-in-need-of-remastering CBS set from the early 90s). What you said about the sounds, that they're doing that then, it applies here. This must have blown so many minds back then -- I mean, it's blowing minds now, for fuck's sake.

man that footage is fantastic. I love later Ellington a whole lot and I feel like watching that stuff develop really brings out its strengths

sometimes i feel like he's too good. makes it hard to realize how amazing what they're doing is, because you're just awash in the pleasure of the sounds.

just getting into duke really, it's way more complex than i thought it would be

That Teachout interview upthread that Øystein posted, he actually makes a few good points, but fuck:

Ellington basically gave up on true large-scale composition after A Tone Parallel to Harlem. That’s the last time he tried to write a large-scale, self-contained, organically developed musical structure.

Not true: "The Degas Suite" (not broken into smaller parts, despite its title) from 1968 and "The River" from 1970.

What albums are those on?

They're both on The Private Collection volume 5.

Cool I've never had any idea which vols to get from that series.

"The Queen's Suite" is one of my favorite late Ellingtons.

He should have done a "Queens Suite" too...

Love The Queen's Suite!

The Vol. 5 dealie is definitely up there with the best late Ellington work. "The River" has an early incarnation of what would later become "Theme For Mahalia Jackson." One of my all-time favorite moments in his oeuvre (and not a dry eye in the house).

I actually went to a school named after Duke Ellington, and we played tons of Ellington stuff in jazz band, so I got a big early dose. I still feel though like his catalogue is just ridiculously overwhelming.

Playing them and then playing like Basie and Neil Hefti charts and stuff (which are all great) you really get a sense of what a totally different level Ellington was operating on compositionally. Like other big band composers you get this tidy sense of melody, then the solos, then the sectional "solis" then back, but Ellington, even though it has some of that, idk it feels somewhere in between that and Stravinsky or something.

yeah it is overwhelming, but it's just great how you keep finding amazing stuff lurking in there. like this one i think i just heard this month from the late 40s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRc_Nvum6l0

This is an (I think) underappreciated tune of his I always loved. It's actually a slightly different version of a tune he did for the Anatomy of a Murder soundtrack, but I like this version more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emd4gB9UtCc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emd4gB9UtCc

The Blanton-Webster Band set is an ideal starting point, but yeah, it's a pretty daunting discography.

But the guy never made a bad record, so you could just about blindly pick anything.

i've said this before on ilm, maybe on this thread, but i was familiar with various things of ellington's for a long time, which i appreciated plenty, prior to him really clicking for me because of the blanton-webster set.

right I know the blanton-webster stuff pretty well, but there's so much else

The first thing I heard after the B-W set was The Far East Suite, which completely floored me. After that, I sought out all late 60s suites.

I used the Penguin Guide as a reference, but I was also taking a tutorial on Ellington in college at the time. Every piece that was played in class, I thought, "Wow, this is great...wow, THIS is great...shit, they're all great."

yeah I like the far east suite

Latin American Suite and Afro-Eurasian Eclipse are nearly as good. "Brasilliance" on the former is just...I mean, what is this?
http://youtu.be/eB1SApN1OM4

if I had to get one ellington primer, you guys would suggest Blanton-Webster? I saw there were a couple of different versions of the set on amazon, both with reviews questions their sound quality.

yeah I'd go with that. I mean, you're going to have some "sound quality" issues on any issue, it's just the nature of the original recordings.

If you're going for that era, get Never No Lament, not the old RCA Bluebird set. Besides the shitty denoise-ing on the Bluebird set, those CDs were/are pretty susceptible to "disc rot."

The period after Blanton-Webster is good, too (sometimes I prefer it), but I've had to live with a Bluebird set analogous to the B-W Bluebird set. The Naxos Jazz Legends "Black, Brown and Beige" CD might be good, though.

i don't have any problems with the sound on the 'never no lament' set (the blanton-webster set i have)

it's 'warm'

yeah never no lament is the one I listen to so maybe I wasn't aware of the problems

one of the things I love about his compositions/arrangements is the way he really lets the countermelodies and harmodies compete with the "melody" in strength, so you don't really get the effect of a "melody" over "chords" but more like moving tonal clusters

like sometimes I don't even feel like there is a single line that sticks out as the melody in the group sections

that's a peculiarity he shares with Delius (I didn't think about it until I read that Percy Grainger quote where he was like "the greatest living composers are Delius and Ellington")

Happy 115th, Duke! 24-hour WKCR birthday broadcast: http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/duke-ellington-birthday-broadcast-tuesday-april-29th

My high school on NPR
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/29/307785387/the-public-school-where-the-duke-lives-on

Nice. Sting & Paul Simon did a benefit for the school earlier this year

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/matthew-shipp-offers-a-stirring-tribute-to-duke-ellington-at-bohemian-caverns/2014/04/28/978f84ec-cee0-11e3-a714-be7e7f142085_story.html

avante-jazzer Shipp

Would've loved to have seen that. I saw that trio about a month ago, and they were astounding. Shipp incorporated "What Is This Thing Called Love?" (which I took as a nod to his fellow Delawarean Clifford Brown), and Dickey put on one of the most sensitive and inspiring percussion performances I've seen in years.

Did you gasp yesterday when the guy announced the next album as Monkey Jungle!?! After the break he repeated the correct title several times.

Posted by curmudgeon on the RIP thread:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/arts/music/herb-jeffries-singing-star-of-black-cowboy-films-dies-at-100.html?_r=0

Very surprised not only that he was one of the last living Ellingtonians, but that he was the last living member of the Blanton-Webster band.