Ellington Study Group Meets for Lunch May 1981

Dick Buckley was a well-known radio presenter in Chicago, who for many years hosted “Jazz With Dick Buckley”. One day in May 1981, he started his program by saying:

What Buckley refers to is a lunch meeting with a small group of eminent American Ellington specialists that took place on a Saturday in May 1981.

It was organized by Donald (Don) Miller – a leading figure on the Ellington scene in Chicago and the founder of the Ray Nance Chapter of the Duke Ellington Society.

He was well connected in the American and international network of Ellington specialists and was very focused on how to preserve the Ellington legacy.

In a report from the meeting published in the DEMS Bulletin 1982/1, Miller sketched the task(s) ahead for what he saw as an Ellington Study Group.

“We are a privileged generation for having personally known and experienced Ellington. This provides us with the opportunity to maximize the record for posterity’s experience of Ellington.”

The guest speaker at the four-hour lunch was the musicologist, composer and author Gunther Schuller.

He was just on his way to start to write the second volume of his work on the history of jazz and it was one of the topics he talked about at the lunch. But he covered many more. Here is one example of what he (and others) said during the lunch.

Miller taped the lunch meeting and in total there are three and a half hour of talks and conversation to listen to. Unfortunately, the recording was not done in the best of ways and the tapes have deteriorated with time. As a result, the sound quality of the tapes varies quite a lot.

However, another 21 minutes of what Schuller and others had to say have been edited together and the result is available in the Ellington Archive.