I have already written about the last issue of the DESS Bulletin. There were special reasons for this as I think many visitors to the website understand but I was not going to neglect Blue Light.
DESUK are now in the position to be the only provider of an Ellington journal to the Ellington community and we should help it by becoming members of DESUK and spread the word about Blue Light. I will certainly continue to do it through Ellington Galaxy.
The main article in the new issue is by Danny Cain about the musical Beggars Holiday. He calls it “A Crocked Thing – A Chronical of Beggar’ Holiday. It is fourteen pages long but it is a Must Read.
The Beggar’s Holiday is often considered as another failure by Ellington to make it on Broadway but Cain’s very detailed article clarifies that story is much more complicated.
It was the brainchild of a black producer Perry Watkins and was conceived as a bi-racial musical. The story was based on John Gray’s play with this name.
It premiered at the Broadway Theatre in New York the day after Christmas 1946 and closed some fourteen weeks later after 108 performances. “Nevertheless, it was a of many outstanding qualities coming as it did in reaction to the optimistic claptrap which soon became the norm among Broadway hits”, Caine writes.
The article by Gareth Evans in the new Blue Light is titled Ellington vis a vis Swing. In a earlier article in BL he wrote something similar but covering a later period: “Duke Ellington’s music despite incorporating elements of bebop into the tapestry of his music in the second half of his career, remained largely apart from the prevailing currents in jazz after the mid 1940’s”.
Now his focus is Swing.
Ellington left Cotton Club in 1931 (my remark) and then several important things happened to enable the Ellington bands transition from the Jungle Band to The Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Gareth mentions five things:
- It expanded to a band with 15 members plus a vocalist (Ivie Anderson),
- Ellington emerged as the dominant personality in the group,
- The band took to the road and was crisscrossing the country performing hundreds of one-night stands in larger and more prestigious venues.
- It benefitted from contracts with first RCA and then Columbia to have a constant flow of records which increased Ellington’s profile and and allowed it to enjoy unprecedented economic success.
- Thanks to Irving Mills, the Ellington band become a more professional and cohesive outfit.
In the article, Gareth gives us a long list of Ellington songs with Swing in the title. Here are some of them.
- Saratoga Swing (March 1929)
- It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Aint Got That Thing
- Swing Low
- Exposition Swing
- Swing Sessions
- Stepping Into The Swing Society
- Swingtime In Honolulu
- Love In Swingtime
- Swingtime In The Dell
- Battle of Swing
Don’t get me wrong, Gareth does not give us of a list of songs but the are framed in usual interesting comments. Furthermore, he has together a Spotify list with all the song.
There are also two articles by Graham Colombé in the new BL.
One is about the liner notes to a CD box issued by the French label Chronological Classics. At one point it started to provide boxes with six CDs bringing together what had been published as singles CDs.
It issued three boxes with Ellington recordings covering 1924-1930, 1930-1933 and 1933-1938.
The liner notes was written by Don Waterhouse for the first two boxes and by Graham Colombé for the third, as far as I understand. The article is a reprint of what he wrote. They take up more than seven pages and basically cover Ellington’s recordings for Columbia and Brunswick during that period.
There is a playlist on Spotify with most of the music also for Classics box.
Another article by Columbé is about the rather unknown clarinet player Nat Jones. He seems to have been brought in to cover for the absence of Otto Hardwicke. However, says Colombé, “the handful identifiable Jones solos are on clarinet and shows a remarkable ability to conjure up the sound and phrasing of Barney Bigard”. Jones recorded two different versions of Ring Dem Bells and three versions of C Jam Blues during his time with Ellington.
There are also two shorter articles in the new issue.
One is Fred Glueckstein writes about Take the ‘A’ Train and manage to get into two pages the full story about the song and major performances of it and the other by Tom Maxwell about Bubber Miley and the development of the growl trumpet.
In July, Cleo Laine died at the age of 94 and Blue Light remembers her in two articles, one by Frank Griffith and the other from her autobiography Cleo.
Author: Ulf Lundin