The first issue of DESS Bulletin for 2025 was sent to the subscribers=DESS members a couple of weeks ago. Sorry for taking too long time to write about it!
The cover artist in this issue is Chubby Kemp – Duke’s Blues Shouter.
and Sven-Erik Baun Christensen’s article about her dominates the issue.
It is ten pages long and and tells everything about her life and career. Sven-Erik’s research work is impressive but it is impossible to remember all the details. Here are some excerpts and summaries.
She was born 11 Sep., 1922 in Detroit but her parents came from Mississippi. It is not known when she started her singing career and took her name, Chubby but she is mentioned under this name in an ad as a “Swing singer” in October 1943.
Three years later at the at the age of 24 , Chubby appears at Club Moonglow in Buffalo, New York in April 1946 and in June the same year she appears as a “Swing and Sweet Singer” at a club in Indianapolis. So by that time, she seems to have established a solid singing career.
Then Kemp is back in Detroit where she does club dates until she joins Jungle Jive Revue, which did tours of the Northern U.S. and also performed in Montreal, Canada.
The years thereafter, she basically played in clubs in Ohio (Toledo, Marion and Dayton) and in March 1949 she played for a week with trumpeter Snooky Young and his orchesta.
In April or May, she joined all-colored variety show called Harlem in Havana, which existed for many years and featured comedians, singers and a group of Cuban and American “exotic” or “burlesque” dancers accompanied by a 12 piece band.
After the Harlem in Havana period, Chubby Kemp went home to Detroit where Duke Ellington met her at the Paradise Theatre in late January 1950 and hired her as an replacement for his singer at that time Lu Elliot, who had left the Ellington band near the end of February. By that time Duke had realised that “big-voiced blues singers” were becoming popular among young people.
Chubby appeared at some Ellington concerts like 9th, 15th and 20th February and one reviewer said “She can sing ’em too, boy. That chick is really gone.”
Kemp arrived in time for Ellington’s 1950 European tour.It was quite a chaotic tour many points of view and the reactions to what Ellington played was quite mixed.
On 13th and 16th October I published articles about the tour to which I refer for more information.
As regards the reactions to Chubby Kemp’s performances during the tour, they were varied.
André Hodier was quite negative. He claimed that Chubby Kemp’s performance transformed the Ellington band into a poor version of Lionel Hampton’s band while another writer in Jazz Hot found her “very good” in her genre and proved Ellington’s deep attachment to the blues.
Generally, the reviewers of other concerts in Europe were mostly positive about Kemp. ” A good representative of the real blues”, wrote one one of them after a concert in the Netherlands. After the concert in Copenhagen on 31st May, one journalist described her singing of Hello Little Boy as “jazz-singing that only a handful of girls in the world can deliver.”
In the article, Sven-Erik also covers Chubby’s stage repertoire during and after the tour and her recordings.
I prefer to start with the recordings
Immediately after she had joined Ellington, she recorded on 11 February 1950 four sides for Mercer Records – Hey Little Boy, The Greatest There Is, Don’t You Know I Care and I Got It Bad. Only the first two was issued but only after the European tour.
Both were sung during the tour with Hey Little Boy as her permanent opening number. Standards like On The Sunny Side of the Street and How High The Moon were also part of her repertoire.
Kemp continued to be the singer of the Ellington band after its return from Europe.Her last performance with Ellington was his engagement at the Chicago Theatre 8-14 December, 1950
Her later career is not easy to follow, says Sven-Erik, “but she appears to have been working regularly nearly to the end of her life, perhaps for a period between 1955 and 1958.”
Another topic in the new number is the Danish “jazzman” Timme Rosencrantz”. He spent a large part of his life in New York, where he arrived in 1934 and died of heart failure at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival.
Bo Haufman wrote an article about Rosencrantz in the Bulletin 2022:4 and in his article The Duke In Scandinavia February 1963, Rasmus Henriksen wrote about Rosencrantz’s interview of Duke Ellington on 9th Feb, 1963.
In the new Bulletin, Henriksen starts a new series called Timme’s Jazz Diary. The first one is not from Timme Rosencrantz book Harlem Jazz Adventures but from an article that Rosencrantz contributed (sold) to a Danish jazz magazinee Sidste Hot-Nyt Fra Ny fra New York. He was a frequent stringer and one can find articles of his hand in both the Swedish jazz magazines Estrad and Orkesterjournalen.
Besides putting the whole Bulletin together, Bo Haufman has contributed two articles in the new Bulletin. One is about At A Dixie Roadside Diner, which Ellington recorded it for Victor 22 July 1940 and which is composed by Joe Joe Burke and and has lyrics by Edgar Leslie. The other is an article Wilbur De Paris.
In the previous issue of the Bulletin, there was an article by Steven Lasker 100 Years of Ellington Records. Since then, Steven has revised the article and the new version will be published in the next issue of Vintage Jazz Mart.
The new Bulletin has an article More of Blu-Disc, which gives the changes to the original text.
It also has a transcription by John Richmond of Stanley Dance’s speech at Duke Ellington’s funeral in Cathedral of St. John the Devine, New York onMay 27 1974.
Summary by Ulf Lundin