A couple pieces from recent Posts that I found interesting:
washingtonpost.com
A new CD from a live performance of what had to have been one of the greatest Supergroups in the history of music:
Bill Berry, trumpet; Clark Terry, trumpet and fluegelhorn; Urbie Green and J.J. Johnson, trombones; Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Gerry Mulligan, baritone saxophone; Hank Jones, piano; Jim Hall, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; Louis Bellson, drums. There were guest stints at the piano by Dave Brubeck, Earl Hines and Billy Taylor The producer of the show? The Nixon White House.
Duke's Place
By Jonathan Yardley
Monday, September 23, 2002; Page C02
Acountry as vast and heterogeneous as this one is by its very nature a nation of anomalies, but even here it's hard to imagine anything more anomalous than the event that took place in the White House on April 29, 1969. The new president, Richard M. Nixon, had got in by the narrowest of margins; the third-party candidacy of George C. Wallace had scared the devil out of him, and he was determined not to concede the "white Southern" -- code phrase, in those days, for "racist" -- vote to him next time around. Nixon was just about the most uptight creature on the planet, the apotheosis of un-hip, of whom it could fairly be said: He don't mean a thing, 'cause he ain't got that swing.
Yet there was Nixon playing host to Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington: black and proud of it, the man who put the phrase "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" into the American language. It was Ellington's 70th birthday and Nixon was throwing him a party, presenting him a Presidential Medal of Freedom as a token of the occasion. Four years earlier the stuffy, unimaginative directors of the Pulitzer Prizes had rejected a jury's recommendation that they give Ellington a special award for his incomparable four-decade career -- Ellington said upon hearing the news: "Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be famous too young" -- but now, through the good if improbable offices of Nixon, the nation was making amends for this injustice.
It did so by playing his music. About 200 people gathered in the East Room to hear a small "big" band play a couple of dozen compositions by Ellington and/or his right-hand man, Billy Strayhorn, at the end of which Ellington himself went to the piano and improvised, in tribute to the new first lady, a piece that he called, simply, "Pat." Word immediately raced through the jazz community that it had been an extraordinary evening, but only a handful of lucky souls got to hear the recording made by the U.S. Information Agency. It played the tape for listeners around the world, but Americans were blacked out.
Now, nearly 3 1/2 decades after the event, the curtain has been lifted. Blue Note has just released a CD called "1969 All-Star White House Tribute to Duke Ellington," about which the first thing to be said is: Run, don't walk . . . et cetera. Not merely is it an essential document of jazz history and Americana, it is breathtaking music. Nearly 76 minutes on 28 tracks are jammed onto the CD -- it's a pity that Nixon's and Ellington's remarks are not included, but presumably there simply wasn't enough space -- and you won't want to miss a single one.
The main force behind the evening wasn't actually Nixon, a "Chopsticks" piano player at best, but one of his assistants, Leonard Garment, a passionate jazz lover who plays the saxophone and actually had gotten a cup of coffee with the Woody Herman Orchestra in his misspent youth. Along with another aide, Charles McWhorter, Garment enlisted Willis Conover, the nonpareil jazz disc jockey of the Voice of America, who assembled the band and organized the program.
What a band it was! Bill Berry, trumpet; Clark Terry, trumpet and fluegelhorn; Urbie Green and J.J. Johnson, trombones; Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Gerry Mulligan, baritone saxophone; Hank Jones, piano; Jim Hall, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; Louis Bellson, drums. There were guest stints at the piano by Dave Brubeck, Earl Hines and Billy Taylor. It would have been easy for Conover simply to bring the entire Ellington band to the White House and have it play yet another road gig, but he decided to let the rest of jazz play tribute to the master. Of those who performed, only Terry and Bellson had worked for Ellington. The rest represented a broad (if, to be sure, mainstream) spectrum of styles; they were members of the jazz elite, and they sure played that way.
The concert consisted of three medleys -- the first by the band, the second by a trio headed by Taylor, the third by the band behind the singer Mary Mayo -- and a dozen separate numbers by various musicians, including, at the end, the great singer Joe Williams. Ellington must have listened to Williams with envy as well as pleasure, because -- with the notable exceptions of Ivie Anderson and Al Hibbler -- his own band rarely had first-rate vocalists. Otherwise, he just listened with pleasure, especially -- so Doug Ramsey's excellent liner notes tell us -- to Mulligan's "piquant" arrangement of "Prelude to a Kiss," Desmond's brilliant evocation of Ellington's great alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges on "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" and Hines's stunning solo on "Perdido."
This last alone is worth the price of admission: two minutes that, as Ramsey puts it, "tapped the essence of jazz." Those two minutes of echt Hines rank up there in the ether -- with Jess Stacy's piano solo on "Sing Sing Sing" in the Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall concert and Ellington's own tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves on "Diminuendo and Crescendo" at Newport in 1956 -- among those evanescent moments of jazz genius that, by the happy fluke of a recording machine's presence, have been preserved forever.
The White House tribute to Ellington was presented before a tiny audience. That it was denied for so long to the American people (who, presumably, paid for it) was an injustice the correction of which is nonetheless welcome for being so late. Listen to it with joy, raise a glass in tribute to the Duke and -- yes, damn it -- give a tip of the hat to Richard M. Nixon. |
