In 1963, Duke Ellington visited Sweden twice. The first visit was in early February and the second in June.
The February visit was part of a long tour organised by Norman Granz and covering England and a large part of Westerm Europe.
The European part started in Paris on Jan. 30 where Ellingon and his orchestra did both recording sessions for Reprise Record (Jan 30-31) and played concerts at Olympia on February 1 and 2. The concerts were recorded and the first one has been issued as The Great Paris Concert.
In the morning of February 3, Ellington and the band embarked a flight at the Orly Airport to go Malmö (the third largest city of Sweden) to start its tour of Sweden, Finland and Denmark.
The tour had been well publisised. On 1 February, the Malmö newspaper Arbetet wrote about Ellington’s tour. After the first concert in London, Melody Maker wrote that it was “an exceptional experience”.
The day after, Dagens Nyheter had an article by one of its members of the editorial Nils-ErikSandberg ( signature Sander), who was an Lund insider since his student year there. In the day of Ellington arrival in Sweden on 3 February, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning published a long article with a lot of focus on Cootie Williams.
Ellington and the orchestra arrived at the Malmö Airport (Bulltofta) a little bit late and were welcomed by an enthusiastic jazz audience, which included Leif Uvemark’s Big Band – a leading dance and jazzband from Malmö – which played for Ellington in the arrival hall.
Dagens Nyheter February 4, 1963
Ellington was also welcomed to Bulltofta and Malmö by the singer Gun Nilsson later Gun Hannel. She gave Duke a kiss on the cheek and he did not mind it.
Arbetet February 4, 1963
Already before going to Sweden, Duke was interviewed by the leading Swedish television news reporter Sven Lindahl at Craydon Airport. It was broadcasted at 7:40 pm on 3 February in the news program Aktuellt apropå.
Ellington was also interviewed but when he arrived at Bulltofta. NDESOR claims that he was interviewed by a journalist with the name Gun Albroth for a progam called Dagens Airport.
This is not correct. The name of the journalist is Gun Allroth and she was a reporter at Sveriges Radio (Swedish Radio) in Malmö at the time and the program must have been Dagen Eko. I have both a newspaper clip and a photo showing when the interview was done and Duke seems to be in very good mood.If anyone has the interview, please get in touch with me.
The Ellington band was transported by bus from Bulltofta to Malmö and most likely at least Duke was put up at the luxury Savoy Hotel opposite the Central Train Station. In the hotel lobby, there is a table with plaques mentioning famous guests in the hotel and Ellington’s name is there.
The two concerts took place in Lund, some 20 km from Malmö and were arranged by the young jazz concert organiser Bo Johnson, who was to organise many more Ellington and other jazz concerts in Malmö. Bo Johnson had bought the right to the concerts from Simon Brehm, who was subcontracted by Norman Granz for the Nordic concerts. He paid 5.000 SEK to Brehm for the concerts.
The personnel was as follows: Cat Anderson, Roy Burrowes, Cootie Williams, Ray Nance trumpets, Lawrence Brown, Chuck Connors, Buster Cooper trombones, Jimmy Hamilton, Russell Procope, Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney reeds, Ellington piano, Ernie Shepard bass and Sam Woodyard drums
Cootie Williams, had come back to band in September 1962 and Lawrence Brown had not played in the Ellington band in Sweden since 1950.
The concert venue was Akademiska Föreningen in the center of Lund. It is at one end of the University Park with the University and Lund Cathedral at other ends. It provided and still provides all kinds of facilities for the students at the universitity, including a big hall for lectures, concerts and more.
The two concerts were completely sold out with1.300 people at each concert. The doors to the main hall had to be opened to hear the music as well.
The orchestra was placed on the left side of the hall and the audience was sitting on folding chairs facing the orchestra.
The reviewer in Arbetet, the second largest newspaper i Malmö considered that the Ellington band, which appeared in Lund, was of “the best vintage ever”.
Also Peter Himmelstrand from the afternoon paper Expressen was and wrote another positive review.
Another an enthusiastic review was Lennart Östberg’s in the February issue of Orkesterjournalen wrote a very good summary of the whole tour considered the two concerts in Lund “absolute first class”.
I attended the first concert and it was the second time I heard Ellington live. The first time was in Malmö in 1959.
None of the concerts were recorded. My strongest memory is what I heard at the beginning of the concert. After the usual start with Take the “A” Train, Ellington said something like this: “Our first selection is a preview of our soon to be released first Reprise record Afro-Bossa. It starts with with primitive rhythm executed in pre-primitive manner by Sam Woodyard.”
I totally froze when Woodyard started to play the “primitive rhythm”. I hadn’t heard anything like this before. It was a new Ellington to me.
The rest of the program must have been similar to what was played in Göteborg, Helsingfors (Helsinki) and Stockholm in the coming days. I will wrote about it in the coming articles.
Thank you to Bo Johnson for providing information and DESS-member Lars-Erik Nygren for scanning newspapers for me and telling me about his memories of the two concerts.
Author: Ulf Lundin