Duke Ellington

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.

man, that guy had an interesting life... wonder if the documentary about him is any good?
this clip is something:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORaSnWF2SX4
though i'll admit to never having been nuts about that song

Thanks for posting that! Interesting arrangement, too -- different from what was released at the time.

It took me a while, but I grew to dig his voice. The first Ellington piece I (knowingly) heard was "You, You Darlin'" off the Blanton-Webster band set. I thought his singing was square and corny, but eventually heard how it worked with the rest of the orchestra. I can't imagine "Flamingo" any other way -- even Mingus' version (which is great) feels like something's missing without Jeffries.

The poster Ben Williams of 11 years ago up-thread is eternally otm, some of the greatest music ever created on there.

Lately I cannot stop playing Ellington Uptown, The Far East Suite + Such Sweet Thunder. What a player/artist/arranger, he even makes Mingus sound like a mere gifted acolyte.

whoa never knew that ellington recorded w/ conny plank! this doesn't sound like neu! but it does sound damn good.
https://soundcloud.com/groenlandrecords/duke-ellington-his-orchestra-afrique-take-3-vocal/
As described by Henrik von Holtum, who wrote the album’s liner notes:

Duke Ellington’s musical works are seemingly well documented; the likelihood of finding a good, unreleased Duke Ellington recording is slight at best. When Grönland Records called and told me they had found exactly that in Conny Plank’s estate and asked me if I wanted to give it a listen, I felt pretty honored, and excited. The music of Duke Ellington is – in my worldview – to jazz what Bach’s oeuvre is to classical music: THE great benchmark, or – to raise it up onto an even higher pedestal – the Old Testament, the alpha and omega. With both Bach and Ellington, you can sit down at a piano simply to go through it building chords and something great always happens. This music is so rich, and it is virtually indestructible.

I listened to the recordings for the first time in Grönland Records’ offices. One session, two songs: three takes each of “Alerado” and “Afrique.” They weren’t just alternate takes, like you often get on reissues of jazz classics; you can really hear Ellington working. He’s not just looking for the best take to get something clearly defined, he’s experimenting.

The tempi change, solo instruments are switched around, and, on the last take of “Afrique,” you can even hear soprano vocals. “Alerado” is a straightforward swing number, it features Wild Bill Davis on the organ, and, most notably, Cat Anderson on the trumpet, who provide a foundation for striking concepts of sonority and solo performance. The musical approach to “Afrique” is freer and more avant-garde; the foundation of the piece is a tom-tom based beat that is sustained throughout and layered with improvisations and arranged segments.

Conny was fascinated by how great the difference in tone was between his prior studio work and those takes; the Ellington big band was delivering something totally different, something better than he was accustomed to. It resulted in a recording that even Conny could be happy with. This session seems to have given an important impulse to his work, independent of the praise he received from the master.

This casts the bon mot often attributed to Conny that “every band gets the sound it deserves” in a different light; it no longer comes across as an arrogant remark, but as a clear conception of a simple fact: one can only produce what’s there – if the performance isn’t any good, technology won’t help either. So, for him, it was a moment of realization and revelation.

And ensuring that the performance was spot-on was one of Conny’s great talents. Independently of one another, artists he later produced repeatedly described how vital his kindheartedness, tranquility and circumspection were to producing successful recordings.

so cool

Whoa new exotica-mode Ellington produced by conny plank??? Is this out yet?

out july 10

this is insanely exciting