The postman delivered the Spring 2024 (Volume 31.1) issue in my mailbox almost a month ago but there has been no time for me to write about until now.
It is of course another issue full of good reading.
One is Danny Caine‘s interview he made with Mercer Ellington in 1979. In an email to Blue Light about the interview Caine says: “It took place on 22 July, 1979 at the Four Season nightclub on the North Side of Chicago.” The interview might have been triggered by Mercer Ellington’s Duke Ellington In Person: An Intimate Memoir, which by that time was available both in hardcover and paperback.
The interview covers a wide field of issues – Irving Mills as impressario, co-composer and perhaps friend, Ellington’s political leanings – radical, anticommunist, patriot, defender of the black cause etc.
There are two answers by Mercer in the interview that I find particularly interesting.
One is about something Mercer wrote in his memoir of Duke: Caine asks: “You mention in your book that there was a kind of paranoia about the man.” The long answer by Mercer starts: “I think it became more pronounced in his life .. I know what it is and I think we all go through it whoever is in entertainment.”
The other answer is about the discord in the Ellington band and the rivalry and tension between the band member. Just one sentance to illustrates this: “It’s a troupe of ballerinas. Each is born to be her own star. And in this thing, they feel it is temporary in order to coexist. But each one has in mind becoming his own individual talent.”
Two other are Gareth Evans’ two articles Little Wilson and Big Eddy: Where and When and The (Electric) Piano Player.
The first one is about a possible meeting between the English authorAnthony Burgess. In the first volume of his autobiography he claims that “in 1972, on a plane from plane from New York to Toronto I find myself sitting next to Duke Ellington.” This claim triggered Gareth Evans’ interest and he started to investigate if such a meeting really took place.
The result is a four and a half page article with a lot of information about the whereabouts and work of the two giants at the time. The reader is persuaded that there was no encounter between Burgess and Ellington but Gareth does not say so directly. He leaves it to the reader to make the conclusion. An elegant way!
In 1955, Ellington became the first musician to be recorded playing an electric piano in a recording session in studio. Gareth’s second article is about this.
He gives us a discourse about the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, which was founded in 1853 with a focus musical instruments. It turned from musical instruments to jukeboxes and vending machines. “In the mid fifties it expanded its range into electrical instruments, which led to the production of the Wurlitzer electric piano.
The Wurlitzer Electric Piano Model 110 was the first to be marketed and by that time Ellington was at the end of his contract with Capitol and unhappy with the company. On May 18th and 19th, a small Ellington group with Ray Nance, Quentin Jackson, Russell Procope, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Woode, Dave Black and Jimmy Grissom recorded five tracks that made use of the electric piano.
Gareth considers that Ellington “sounds like the novice he certainly was. There are several occasions 0n which we can hear him hammer the keys in the way he would a conventional piano.”
Listen to the five songs recorded at the two recording sessions.
A fourth must read is Fred Glueckstein’s article about Duke Ellington’s mother Daisy Kennedy Ellington. The five page article is invaluable and has everything one needs to know about her – family background, birth Jan 4 1879, marriage, children, childhood care of Duke in Washington D.C. and later of the grown-up man in New York and illness leading to death on May 17, 1935. Ellington was told about her conditions only a week before she died. She had her brought to Detroit, MI where he had a one-week engagement atEastwood Gardens. The show had to go on and obligations be met but Duke also made his best to be at her side until she entered a sanitorium where she died.
What else has the new issue of Blue Light to offer?
Gareth Evans writes about the video Meet The Duke, which is part of Volume One of the Tempo Arts Documentary Series.
There are five quite original poems by the English author Robin Thomas inspired by Duke Ellington’s music – All Too Soon, Black Brown and Beige, Billy Strayhorn’s JourneyBlood Count and Rock skipping at the Blue Note.
Willie Ruff, jazz muscian music scholar and educator primarily as a Yale professor from 1971 to 2017, who died on Dec. 24 last year, is honoured by Gareth Evans in a In Memorian.
Ezio Chiarelli tries to identify the second singer in Duke Ellington’s recording of Joog Joog on Dec. 22, 1949.
And of course there is the usual calendar of concerts in England with Ellington music.
Author: Ulf Lundin