Also on 7 February, the fourth day of Ellington’s concert tour of Sweden was going to be hectic. It started after lunch with the rehearsals for the concert part of the telecast Indigo and the recording of it in the evening.
According to Lennart Östberg, “Alice Babs had from the very start good contact with Ellington and the musicians. She was very convincing in the two Georg Riedel arrangements of Take The “A” Train and Take Love Easy and made the performance of her life in Come Sunday.”
Three ballets with soloists from the Cullberg Ballet were also rehearsed and recorded – Star-Crossed Lovers, Romeo and Julia and Bula (called Revolt by the choreographer Birgit Cullberg). If it was on the same day, is not clear.
An article about the telecast was published on the website 24 Nov. 2016. It will be republished in a couple of days.
After the recording of Indigo, it was time for another recording session. “Ellington went into a waiting car and the band members into a waiting bus to be transported to the recording studio of Europafilm in the small town of Sundbyberg not far from the center of Stockholm.”
There a select group of members of the Stockholm Philharmonics (32 strings, 9 winds, 4 french horns, tuba, harp, kettledrums and percussions) were waiting to take part in the recording session for Reprise Records of the Ellington suite Night Creature. The brass section in the Ellington band had been reinforced by one trumpet and one trombone.
According to Lennart Östberg, “the recording session started around midnight but at 4 am everybody was totally exhausted so one had to stop. By then, 17 minutes of the complicated piece had been recorded.” Östberg also noted that “in a break during the rehearsal, Ellington sat down at the piano and improvised a little bit on a short motif and Billy Strayhorn sat in with the band while Ellington instructed the Stockholm Philharmonics muscians.”
According to NDESOR, there exists five takes of Blind Bug, six takes of Stalking Monster and five takes of Dazzling Creature from the recording session at Europafilm. Only take 5 of Blind Bug and take 4 of Stalking Monster have been issued.
When the Ellington and the band entered the car and the buses, they had been working for 14 hours and they would only get 4 hours sleep before it was time to go Bromma Airport and board onto the flight to Copenhagen for another concert.
The newspaper reports about the day were mainly focused on Indigo but also the Reprise recording session was covered like in this article in the daily Arbetet on 9 February 1963.
Author: Ulf Lundin