In the first half of June 1958, Ellington and his orchestra were playing their traditional summer gig at Blue Note and Ellington took the opportunity to bring six of his band members to the WBBM studio in Chicago for a CBS telecast with the title Jazz In The Round.
They were Clark Terry and Harold Baker on trumpets, Britt Woodman on trombone, Jimmy Hamilton clarinet, Jimmy Woode, bass and Sam Woodyard drums and of course Duke was at the piano.
The program was short versions of Perdido, Tenderly and Launching Pad, the latter title was jokingly presented by Duke as “Blues In The Round”. Duet is played by Jimmy Hamilton and Jimmy Woode only.
Jones, which was often used to end concertos at this point in the orchestra’s life, is a much longer version than usually, with both Clark Terry, Harold Baker and Jimmy Hamilton soloing. The telecast ends with Take The A Train.
This instrumentation was pretty unusual for the Duke Ellington, says Anders Asplund who wrote the article, “maybe the only one in existence”.
Anders, provided the tape with the telecast and considers that the sound of it is fair or even very good. In his article he regrets that he had not found a video copy of the telecast.
Our source material is coming from this telecast, which obviously also had some other contents, hence the announcer says he was going to introduce some girl singer, which does not appear on the tape.
The original article has Tenderly as a teaser and I have kept it.
Everything on the tape was published as a Goodie. I am happy to have found all the Goodies but it is not easy to republish them so I have made a full copy of the Goodie in another way. The electric noise is still there but I cannot find I way to get rid of it. If anyone knows how to do it, please tell me.
The tape I have published is 18:52 minutes long but in the beginning of the telecast it is announced that the telecast was to be 30 minutes.
After close listening to the tape and checking the DEMS Bulletin, I think that the missing 11 minutes from the end of Tenderly to the beginning of Blues in the Round was a performance by singer Lucy Reed and dancer Beverly Kelly.
Ulf Lundin