A new issue of the DESS Bulletin (2025:2) reached its readers this week.
The cover artist is this time is the trombone player Julian Priester.
Ken Steiner has written the cover article about Priester and gives a good portrait of him from different periods of his career.
He played with Duke Ellington for the first six month of 1970 and things did not work well between him and Ellington. Perhaps he was not an Ellington man in his soul. He was really a modernist!
When Priester came to the Ellington band, he was already “recognized as one of the top trombonists in jazz, had recorder two albums as a leader and had been voted Number One New Star on trombone in the 1961 International Critics’ Pool.
Priester was born in 1935 on the South Side of in Chicago and listened both to big band at the Regal Theatre as an usher and stepped on the stage of blues clubs to jam.
In 1954 or 1955, he joined Sun Ra’ Arkestra where he learned a lot. “He left it to us to interpret what he’s doing.”
The next step was a seven month tour with Lionel Hampton after which he was stranded in New York but hooked up with his school friend Johnny Griffin. Through him he met both Thelonious Monk and jazz producer Orrin Keepnews of Riverside Records, which did recordings Priester.
His first record with Riverside as leader was Keep Swingin’. It led to a job offer from Max Roach with whom he worked to the mid-Sixties.
After different sorts of jobs, Priester played with Ellington in the Reader Digest recording session on September 3-4 for and was asked to join the orchestra a couple of months later. He stayed with Ellington until June
Another ambitious article in the new Bulletin is a five page article by DESS member Rasmus H.Henriksen’s about the valve trombone. It is entitled Valve in Head.
It’s first part is about the the technical development of the two types of tromnbone – the slide trombone which goes back the 15 Century and the valve trombone which appeared in the early 19th century.
In some countries, the valve trombone almost outdid the slide trombone but in the late 19th and early 20th century the slide trombone began to outdo the valve trombone.
Since Henriksens mission is to write about the valve trombone, he has really only one trombonist to write about in an Ellington context and that is Juan Tizol. He covers Tizol’s compositions and recordings well and who replaced Tizol when he left the Ellington orchestra
In addition, there are two “reprint” articles in the new Bulletin . One is from Mark Zirpollo’s website https://swingandbeyond.com about Billy Strayhorn’s composition Blood Count and another an article by David Berger about the Ellington composition Harlem.
The new Bulletin also publishes an interview which Harriet Mines did with Tony Watkins in New York on 19th November 1982. In the interview, Watkins tells about his meeting with Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II together with Duke Ellington after the concert at Palladium in London for the Actor’s Fund.
The two articles in the new Bulletin by Bo Haufman himself are one about trumpeter and singer Louis Bacon and and another about the tenorsaxofonist John Hardee.
Author Ulf Lundin