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781X92 E46L 

Lambert 

Duke Ellington 



66-OS39_ 



66-08399 

780.92 S46L A ?~ 
Lambcrt 

Ellington 



3 1148 00486 1654 




3 1148 00486 1654 



KINGS OF JAZZ 



Duke Ellington 



BY G. E. LAMBERT 



A Perpetua Book 

A. S. BARNES AND COMPANY, INC. 
NEW YORK 



Copyright Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1959 
Perpetua Edition 1961 

A. S. Barnes and Company, Inc. 

11 East 36th Street 
New York 16, New York 



Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-16819 

All Rights Reserved 
Printed in the United States of America 



CONTENTS 

PART PAGE 

1 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 1 

2 THE MUSIC 34 
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY 73 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 88 



6608399 



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 



The sources for the biographical data presented in this 
book are too various to list, but I would like to acknow 
ledge in particular, Duke Ellington by Barry Ulanov 
(Musicians Press, London, 1947) and Duke Ellington: His 
Life and Music, edited by Peter Gammond (Phoenix House, 
London, 1958), which were the principal sources used. 

I would also like to thank the many friends who assisted 
in various ways towards the completion of this book. In 
particular, Miss Anne Bradbury and Mr. Percy Buckley 
for checking the MS.; Miss Bradbury and Miss B. Kenyon 
for assistance with the typing; and the following local col 
lectors for the loan of records to fill out my own Ellington 
collection: Alan Buckley, Percy Buckley, Alec Greenhalgh 
and Tony Whale. 

G.E.L. 



VI 



I. A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April 29th, 1899, 
in Washington, D.C. His family seem to have been fairly 
well-to-do, by Negro standards in the American capital, his 
father being a butler who, at the time of his son's birth, 
occasionally served at White House functions. Later James 
Edward Ellington became a blueprint maker for the U.S. 
Navy, and from all reports he was an easy, relaxed indi 
vidual. Edward Kennedy was brought up an only child, his 
sister not being born until he reached the age of sixteen, 
and the happy atmosphere of his home life during child 
hood can be gauged from the fact that to the son, as well 
as to visiting relatives, James Edward was known as 
'Uncle Ed'. 6 Uncle Ed sure provided for his family, 9 Duke 
has said, 6 we didn't want for anything.' His mother, Daisy 
Kennedy, seems to have been a perfect foil for the more 
easygoing James Edward; a woman of strict principle and, 
we are told, prim manner. In the Washington of this period, 
when racial segregation laid very great stress on a Negro 
family, Ellington's childhood environment must have been 
unusually happy to have provided the basis of temperament 
for the relaxed, urbane, master of all situations which he 
became in later years. Perhaps the index of his childhood is 
to be found in that strong sense of loyalty which he feels 
for those close to him and which he demands in turn from 
Ms musicians and Ms friends. 

1 



His hobbies as a child followed the usual pattern for a 
young American of this era baseball, football and the 
movies. He has recalled that his first musical memory is of 
his mother playing The Rosary when he was four years old, 
but though he started to take piano lessons from a lady by 
the improbable sounding name of Klingscale (other ver 
sions of this name have been reported as Mrs. Klinkscale 
and Mrs. Chinkscale), he derived little satisfaction from the 
piano at that tender age. Although he played at a church 
concert given by Mrs. Klingscale, he had little enthusiasm 
for music and avoided practice whenever possible. Unlike 
those other members of what have been termed 'jazz nobi 
lity', 'King' Oliver, who was so styled by his admirers in 
New Orleans and 'Count' Basie, named by a radio an 
nouncer, Edward Kennedy Ellington had his title bestowed 
upon him many years before he played jazz. The name, so 
utterly correct in its definition of the princely manner of 
the man, was given by a boyhood friend and neighbour at 
the rather early age of eight! 

Duke Ellington spent some three years at what was one 
of the leading high schools for Negroes in Washington at 
that time. During the first of the three years or so that he 
was at the Armstrong High School, Duke's greatest interest 
seems to have been in drawing, at which he showed very 
great promise. He also took regular music lessons at the 
school, later supplemented by private lessons from a Henry 
Grant of the Dunbar High School, who was also the teacher 
of both Otto Hardwicke and Arthur Whetsol. 

About this time Ellington won a poster contest spon 
sored by the National Association for the Advancement of 
Coloured People, and just prior to his leaving the Arm 
strong High School in June, 1917, he was offered a scholar 
ship to the Pratt Institute of Applied Arts. This he turned 
down, presumably on account of his increasing pre-occu- 
pation with music, for by this time Duke had come into con 
tact with the house rent parties which were so common a 
feature of Negro city life during this period. Each large 
American city had, in those pre-mass entertainment days, 
2 



Its own favourite party piano players. Chicago's Jimmy 
Yancey and Cripple Clarence Lofton became known in later 
years through their recordings, whilst many of the New 
York rent party pianists became international figures 
through their later fame in the worlds of jazz and popular 
entertainment for example Count Basie, Fats Waller and, 
of course, the pianist of New York in the 'teens and 'twen 
ties James P. Johnson. Although he was impressed by the 
local heroes of ragtime piano men like Clarence Bowser, 
Louis Thomas, Louis Brown, Lester Dishman and Doc 
Perry the prime influence on the young Ellington was 
without doubt the great James P. Ellington. He has 
described how he obtained a piano roll of Johnson's famous 
Carolina Shout^ and played it on the pianola very slowly so 
that he could follow the fingering and study the intricacies of 
James P.'s style. Duke also pays tribute to Doc Perry as 
the man who taught him to 'read notes, not just spell them 
out'. 

When James P. Johnson came to Washington, so one 
legend goes, Duke played in a carving contest against him 
and, with the strong local support in the audience, suc 
ceeded in 'carving' the master. Duke has denied this in 
recent years, and it seems indeed a rather unlikely story, 
although there is no doubt that around this time Ellington 
did play at some party and made quite an impression with 
James P. While still at Armstrong High, Duke took an after- 
school job at the Poodle Dog Cafe as a 4 soda jerker', and he 
named his first composition, The Soda Fountain Rag. As 
soon as opportunity presented itself, Duke played this at a 
local cafe : he played it straight, as a blues, as a foxtrot, as 
a waltz and finally as a fast tempo stomp. "They never 
knew it was the same piece, 9 recalled Duke, many years 
later. 4 I was established ... I had a repertoire.' Subse 
quently Duke played several jobs as solo pianist and with 
local bands, the latter along with two other young musi 
cians who were later to find fame as members of his or 
chestra Otto Hardwicke and Arthur Whetsol. 

In 1918 Duke married Edna Thompson, a girl he had 

3 



been friendly with at school and who had Helped him with 
his piano studies; the following year their son, Mercer, 
was born. At first he worked gigs in the evenings and 
painted posters during the day in order that his family 
would he well provided for, hut he found that he was more 
and more able to use his musical ability as a means of in 
come. He had been playing for some time with a group of 
young musicians and had noticed that the better-known 
local band leaders had large advertisements in the phone 
book. Duke bought one just as big as theirs, and before long 
he and his musicians were handling all the engagements 
they had time for. During this period a drummer from New 
York, Sonny Greer, was playing at the Howard Theatre 
in Washington, and when the Ellington musicians heard 
him they were impressed by his abilities, and soon per 
suaded this somewhat colourful character to join them. 
This was in 1919; Sonny Greer left Duke Ellington's orches 
tra in 1950! 

In 1922 five of this group of young "Washington musicians 
left for New York Ellington, Hardwieke, Whetsol, Greer 
and banjoist Elmer Snowden, the pretext being a tele 
gram from Wilbur Sweatman asking Greer to join his band. 
The job with Sweatman did not last long however, and, 
although the young musicians hung around New York for 
some time, work and food were both in short supply. It was 
during this period that Ellington heard the pianist Willie 
'The Lion' Smith, who probably influenced his own key 
board style more than any other single musician during his 
formative years. Duke also had many opportunities to hear 
the playing of James P. Johnson and his brilliant young 
pupil Fats Waller while in New York, and it was Waller 
who persuaded them to try New York again when they had 
returned to Washington after three months of scuffling. 
After playing various odd engagements in New York they 
were able to land a regular job at a place called the Holly 
wood Club, later re-named the Kentucky Club. It is doubt 
ful if this group had much to offer in the way of jazz, the 
line up in the spring of 1923 being Arthur Whetsol, trum- 
4 



pet; Otto Hardwicke, alto; Duke Ellington, piano; Elmer 
Snowden (the nominal leader of the band at this time), ban 
jo; and Sonny Greer, drums. The band spent the next four 
and a half years at the Kentucky Club, and it was here that 
Sonny Greer won considerable fame as the man who tipped 
off the waiters as to which of the customers were to be 
provided with drinks during those days of prohibition. 
Most of the customers were acceptable, as the Club was 
mainly a place for theatre and show-business people, but 
if anyone looked suspicious the w r aiter would see Sonny, 
behind his typically extravagant drum kit, shake his head 
and for that individual prohibition would be in force even 
within the Kentucky Club! 

After some disagreement with the other members of the 
band, Elmer Snowden left and was replaced by Fred Guy 
on banjo, while the leadership of the group passed over to 
Duke Ellington. Another personnel change which had a 
greater impact was the addition of Charlie Irvis on trom 
bone. Whetsol and Hardwicke, who recorded prolifically 
with Ellington in later years, were both 'sweet' rather than 
6 hot' musicians, and it was Irvis who first added a distinct 
jazz voice to Ellington's band. He was a rougher player 
than the WasMngtonians ; his style partly inspired by the 
New Orleans trombonists and partly made up of an in 
dividual manner of playing with a mute a sort of em 
bryonic form of the style later perfected by Irvis* successor, 
trombonist Joe Nanton, and by Bubber Miley, a trumpet 
player who joined Ellington whilst he was still at the Ken 
tucky Club. The reason that Miley joined Ellington was 
that, despite the protests of his fellow bandsmen, Arthur 
Whetsol was going back to Washington to complete his 
medical studies, and Duke needed a replacement. Bubber 
Miley was to play with Ellington for six years, and he was 
without doubt the most influential musician who ever 
played with the band in his effect on Ellington's music. 
Miley played muted in almost all Ms solos, and along with 
Ms manipulation of the rubber plunger he would combine 
growls and blue inflexions, at times seeming to make the 

5 



trumpet talk. His style Has often been described as *wa-wa 9 
or 'growl', and he was a very great influence on many 
younger musicians who adopted this manner of muted 
playing. Yet Miley's melodic line was also unique and he 
must be given credit for his part in the creation of several 
of the finest works associated with Duke Ellington. East 
St. Louis Toodle-oo, Black and Tan Fantasy and Creole Love 
Call all bear Miley's name as part-composer, and it is prob 
able that Ellington would have taken a good deal longer in 
arriving at his own maturity as a musician had it not been, 
for the cathartic effect Miley had on the band, and upon its 
leader's creations. For Miley, like all good jazzmen, was 
basically a blues musician, and it was the influence of this 
infinitely pliable material, more than Bubber's exotic 
growl, which revolutionized the young Ellington's outlook 
on music. 'Our band changed its character when Bubber 
came in,' says Duke. 'He used to growl all night long, play 
ing gutbucket on his horn. That was when we decided to 
forget all about the sweet music.' 1 

Charlie Irvis left the band in late 1926 and was replaced 
by Joe 'Tricky Sam' Nanton, whose trombone style was a 
reflection (on his lower pitched instrument) of Bubber 
Miley's trumpet. Around this time the band augmented its 
rhythm section to a quartet by the addition of Bass Ed 
wards on tuba. Three further additions brought the band to 
the strength we know from its earliest recordings as a com 
plete unit an additional trumpet player to take the open 
solos and provide the lead in Louis Metcalf ; a tenor saxo 
phonist who was also an able clarinettist in Rudy Jackson; 
and a second alto, Harry Carney, who had the unusual 
distinction for that day of doubling on baritone saxophone. 
The first two did not stay with the band for very long, but 
Harry Carney's baritone still graces the Ellington band 
stand in 1959 thirty-three years after he first joined the 
band! Throughout the history of the Ellington orchestra 
Carney has added to the texture of Ellington's scores a deep, 

1 Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro (Editors), Hear Me Talkin? to Ya, p. 209 
(Peter Davies, 1955). 

6 



rich, sound which, it seems, only lie can draw from the bari 
tone. He is of course the leading soloist on his instrument 
and one of the most distinguished and accomplished musi 
cians in jazz. This personnel Miley and Metcalf on trum 
pets, Nanton on trombone, Hardwicke, Jackson and Carney 
on reeds, and the rhythm section of Ellington, Guy, Ed 
wards and Greer was probably the one heard by the im 
presario, Irving Mills, when he made his historic entry into 
the Kentucky Club one evening in 1926. 

According to Ellington the band were playing St. Louis 
Blues when Mills walked in and, after the number was over, 
Mills asked Duke what it was. Mills said that it sounded 
nothing like St. Louis Blues 6 so maybe that gave Mm 
ideas,' says Duke. Mills' version is rather different; the 
number which attracted his attention was Black and Tan 
Fantasy. 'When I learned that it was Duke's composition, 
I immediately recognized that I had encountered a great 
creative artist and the first American composer to catch 
in his music the true jazz spirit.' 1 

ii 

Irving Mills was not a musician (despite the large number 
of Ellington compositions bearing the credit 'Ellington- 
Mills'), but he is an important figure in the life of Duke 
Ellington. In having the business and publicity worries 
handled by Mills, Duke was able to devote the maximum 
amount of time to composition and the band's musical 
development. Whatever one's personal opinions of the enter 
tainment business may be, there can be little doubt that 
the emergence of Irving Mills to take up the business side 
of the Ellington orchestra was an unqualified blessing, in the 
social context of the 1920s. Mills, a prodigiously energetic 
individual, was a song publisher, band manager, publicity 
agent and, in later years, record company executive. Elling 
ton was served by Mills in all these capacities. Together 
they formed a company known as Ellington, Inc., and Mills 
i Ibid. p. 211. 

7 



set into motion the means of making Ellington an inter 
nationally known figure. First of all Mills arranged a num 
ber of recordings for labels better known than the somewhat 
obscure ones on which the Ellington musicians had thus 
far appeared. It was through Mills that the band landed the 
long engagement at the Cotton Club in late 1927, after a 
theatre owner in Philadelphia had been persuaded to release 
the band from a contract to enable them to appear on the 
opening night. The means of 'persuasion' employed was to 
send a local gangster to the manager in question with the 
simple proposition, 6 Be big, or you'll be dead.' He was 6 big% 
and the band opened on time. For the next few years they 
were a permanent feature at the Cotton Club, with the 
exception of a few months in the summer of 1930, when the 
band went to Hollywood to take part in the Amos an 9 
Andy film, Check and Double Check. Significant changes 
were made in the band during this period, the first being the 
replacement of tuba player, Bass Edwards with the New 
Orleans string-bass player, Wellman Braud, just before the 
band moved in to the Cotton Club. Another New Orleans 
man in clarinettist Barney Bigard, who had experience 
with both Jelly-Roll Morton and King Oliver, added his 
very distinctive voice to the band in January of 1928. In 
March of that year Arthur Whetsol returned to make the 
trumpet section up to three pieces, and eight months later 
Freddy Jenkins replaced Louis Metcalf, adding an indi 
vidual style and an extremely colourful personality to the 

band. 

The most important personnel change occurred when 
Otto Hardwicke left in June of that same year. He 
was replaced by Johnny Hodges, already a distinctive solo 
ist on alto and soprano saxes, and a musician who was, in a 
few years' time, to become the greatest soloist on his in 
strument that music has ever known. A remarkably even 
musician in his constant inspiration and in the unvarying 
quality of his work, Johnny Hodges is one of the few artists 
in any field who never perform badly. 

The environment at the Cotton Club was hardly one 

8 



in which the music critics (who were in a few short years to 
compare Ellington with Delius, Debussy and Stravinsky) 
would have expected to find a budding genius. For much of 
the time the band were either playing accompaniments to 
popular singers of the day, such as Adelaide Hall, Ethel 
Waters and the Mills Brothers (who were just becoming 
well known as the first of the vocal quartets), or playing 
background music to dancing routines. Much of the music 
played at the Cotton Club was not Ellington material at 
all, yet during this period he recorded many of the master 
pieces wilich were to bring him acclaim from so many diverse 
sources. He also recorded many of the popular tunes of the 
day, some of which were only average by the not particu 
larly elevated standards in this field. Many of these records, 
however, proved to be gems of orchestral jazz; the section 
playing, the solos and the scoring showed that Duke could 
more than hold his own with other large jazz groups, even 
without the unique compositions which are naturally asso 
ciated with him. 

In February, 1929, Bubber Miley left the band, and 
Ellington replaced him with Charles Melvin Williams, a 
young trumpet player from Mobile, Alabama better 
known amongst jazz devotees as 'Cootie'. Cootie Williams 
had made quite an impression on the New York jazz scene 
during brief periods with the orchestras of Chick Webb 
and Fletcher Henderson, although his reputation had come 
solely from his open playing. Ellington hired Williams as a 
replacement for Bubber Miley however, and, with some 
assistance from Tricky Sam Nanton, Cootie mastered the 
growl style of his predecessor, and it was this style with 
which he became associated in later years. He is also an 
authoritative player on the open trumpet, with much of the 
majesty of Louis Armstrong's best work. Indeed Cootie 
Williams is one of the finest of jazz trumpet players, and 
the neglect of his work in recent years is one of the least 
satisfactory aspects of the jazz scene. The story of Bubber 
Miley's life after leaving Ellington is brief and tragic. He 
played for a while in the bands of Noble Sissle and Zutty 

9 



Singleton, and later formed a group of his own under the 
sponsorship of Irving Mills to play in the revue Harlem 
Scandals. Although he had been warned that he was tuber 
culous some time before, in early February, 1932, he had to 
give up playing because of his condition, and he died ^on 
May 20th of the same year. It is said that not one musician 
attended the funeral of this remarkable jazzman; the only 
tribute to his contribution to music at Bubber Miiey's 
funeral was a very large wreath of flowers from Duke 
Ellington. 

During their stay at the Cotton Club the playing of the 
Ellington band was often referred to as 'jungle style'. This 
was because, although situated in Harlem, the Cotton Club 
was in actual fact a club for the whites who came uptown 
to hear and see 'primitive' music and entertainment. The 
Cotton Club's jungle decor catered for this very taste, and 
as Ellington's more 'exotic' compositions (i.e. those in 
cluding 'growl' brass features) were used to back the dances 
during the 'jungle' sequences, it was not surprising that, 
with the aid of astute publicity, Ellington's band was soon 
associated with 'jungle music'. Ellington's titles reflect this 
tendency for from this period come such titles as Jungle 
Jamboree, Jungle Blues, Jungle Nights in Harlem and 
Echoes of the Jungle; titles which owe more to the publicity 
office of Irving Mils than the compositions of Duke Elling 
ton to which they are appended. It is essential to the new 
comer to Duke Ellington's music to understand this, for 
the growl style perfected by Miley and Nanton is a perfectly 
legitimate development of the Vocalization' of instrumental 
tone and inflexion which is so primary a characteristic of 
American Negro music. It is in fact a part of the blues tra 
dition in jazz, and most emphatically neither a borrowing 
from nor an impression of African Negro musical idioms. It 
is rather odd that some commentators have considered the 
use of 'growl' style by Ellington to be an exotic superficiality, 
whilst in fact it is one of the most traditional elements in his 
style. The Ellington band used various pseudonyms when 
recording for different companies in the 'twenties and 
10 



'thirties, and it is a rather ironic commentary on the en 
vironment of the band to recall that the first serious attempt 
at extended composition in jazz, Creole Rhapsody , which 
Duke recorded in 1931, was issued as by 'The Jungle Band' ! 
In 1930, Ellington finally split with his wife, Edna 
Thompson, and he was married a second time, to Mildred 
Dixon, a dancer at the Cotton Club. During this time 
Duke's parents and his son Mercer lived with him in New 
York, and the Ellington home was a happy, if somewhat 
hectic place. In 1929, a few months after Cootie Williams 
had joined the band, Duke added a second trombonist in 
Juan Tizol, a musician from Puerto Rico who specialized 
on the valve trombone. Rarely featured in jazz solos, Tizol 
was to become a distinctive voice with the Ellington en 
semble through his collaboration with Duke in such com 
positions as Perdido, Caravan., Congo Brava, etc.; numbers 
which employ (with the exception of the first named) exotic 
Latin-American rhythms and scoring. In 1932 the trom 
bone section was brought up to the then unheard-of 
strength of three by the addition of a musician from the 
West Coast, Lawrence Brown. Brown was already known 
to jazz collectors through his recordings with Louis Arm 
strong, and his addition to the Ellington ranks was the 
cause of the first of those unfavourable uproars created 
periodically by the critics when a new jazz musician has 
joined the orchestra. Such influential writers as John 
Hammond in America and Spike Hughes in England con 
demned the addition of Brown ; it was not that he was con 
sidered a poor musician, but it was felt that his personality 
was too 'sophisticated', his style too 'virtuoso', for the 
'essentially direct and simple music* of Ellington. 'It is not 
that his individuality is too strong,' wrote Hughes, 'just 
misplaced.' Similar outcries have been made about Rex 
Stewart (1934), Jimmy Hamilton (1943) and Clark Terry 
(1951) when they joined the band, and however justified 
the critics appeared before the results of such changes were 
heard on record, Ellington has always proved conclusively 
that he knows better who will fit into Ms band than the 

11 



most perceptive of critics. It is only just to point out, how 
ever, that not all commentators have considered that 
Ellington's output has teen uniform in quality through the 
years. Spike Hughes, for example, considers that from about 
this period Ellington's music started to decline in quality 
and that generally Ms work in the middle and late 'thirties 
suffered from over-sophistication and too great a concern 
with harmony. A further addition to the band at this time 
was vocalist Ivie Anderson, who was the first regular 
singer that Duke carried with the band. Vocalists have 
never been Ellington's strongest suit, but on many record 
ings Ivie Anderson's singing blends well with the band's 
performances and she is probably the finest singer that he 
has ever had. 

Despite the great commercial success of the band in 
America and the appreciation of his immense talents as a 
composer, both in his own country and in Europe, Duke 
Ellington had, by 1932, become dissatisfied with his mode 
of living. With the continual commercialism of the Cotton 
Club, and of other such engagements, the 'high life' which 
he had led for the past few years began to pall. His friends 
noticed a new moodiness, a certain cynicism in the manner 
of this previously happy individual. In his brilliant study 
of Ellington's personality, The Hot Bach, Richard O. Boyer 
quotes Duke's recollections of this period: 'I'd bring some 
thing I thought was good to the music publishers and they'd 
ask, "Can an eight-year-old child sing it ?" I'd bring some 
thing new to them and they'd say, "This ain't what we're 
looking for. We want something like Gazookus wrote last 
week." I'd see guys writing little pop numbers that were 
going over big. I didn't see why I should try to do some 
thing good. I thought I'd stop writing. ... If something 
bad was plugged it would go over better than something 
good that wasn't. I felt it was all a racket. I was on the 
point of giving up.' 1 Whether the reputation that Elling 
ton's records had made for him amongst music lovers in 

1 Kichard O. Boyer, The Hot Bacfc, reprinted in Duke Ellington, p. 56, edited 
by Peter Gammond (Phoenix House, 1958). 

12 



Europe was tlie deciding factor, or whether the travel and 
change of environment were the things desired most by 
Ellington, we do not know, but a European trip was decided 
upon. In the summer of 1933 (despite Ellington's fear of 
icebergs) the band set sail for England, the first stage of a 
European tour. 

in 

In England, Ellington's reputation rested solely on his 
records, and the audience for these included not only the 
lovers of the latest dance music craze, but also a growing 
band of jazz record collectors and a number of figures of 
some eminence in the w^orld of European concert music. 
Such writers on jazz as Leonard Hibbs and Spike Hughes 
stressed continually the importance of Ellington's music, 
and the distinguished composer Constant Lambert was a 
great admirer of his work. In America the composer Percy 
Grainger had compared Ellington with Bach and Delius, 
and much was made of this comparison in England. The 
names of Debussy and Ravel were also bandied about some 
what freely in connexion with Duke's compositions at this 
time. Of course there was a huge press barrage of publicity 
of a less esoteric nature promoted by Irving Mills and the 
British band-leader Jack Hylton, who was organizing the 
band's European trip. They played variety theatres in 
various large cities in Britain and also two concerts in 
London sponsored by the Melody Maker, the first of which 
provoked a bitter controversy. Designed to show Ellington 
as a composer, the first half consisted of such music as 
Echoes of the Jungle, Blue Tune, Creole Rhapsody and 
Black and Tan Fantasy. The audience reaction to the muted 
work of Cootie Williams and Tricky Sam Nanton was that 
of people hearing a clever piece of instrumental trickery, 
or some weird novelty, rather than a colourful, integrated 
part of Ellington's tonal palate. Sensing that the audience 
were not (when they laughed at Tricky Sam's solos) taking 
the attitude that he and his critical followers had hoped, 
Duke changed the programme for the second half and in- 

13 



eluded Lawrence Brown's Trees, Freddie Jenkins singing 
and dancing Some of These Days, and such popular material 
as Minnie the Moocher and Tiger Rag. The serious devotees 
of Ellington's music were horrified; Duke had 'debased 
himself'; he had commercialized his art! The most angry 
voice was that of Spike Hughes, and in the programme of 
the second concert, which was held three weeks later, the 
audience were advised by Hughes how to conduct them 
selves in a concert hall. 'Don't laugh at Nanton,' said 
Hughes. 'Don't applaud during numbers.' He was promptly 
dubbed 'the hot dictator', and his part in these events has 
been constantly maligned by almost all writers who have 
discussed Ellington's 1933 tour. However strongly one may 
disagree with the opinions Hughes later expressed about 
the decline of Ellington's music, there is no denying that if 
Duke was able to create music worthy of the time and atten 
tion of a concert audience, then Spike Hughes was com 
pletely right. Ellington did indeed offer music of such 
quality, the playing of Williams and Nanton being an in 
tegral part of this music, and no person in his right mind 
can consider that to have someone laughing at every muted 
solo was a desirable state of affairs. Hughes' methods were 
drastic, but well justified. The attention paid to Ellington's 
music throughout the European tour must have been 
pleasing to Duke, yet the last thing that Irving Mills wanted 
was for Ellington to be considered 'highbrow'. Respect for 
his music, yes; but Ellington's popularity could be seriously 
affected by too much of this sort of thing. Nothing sells less 
well amongst the general public than that which is labelled 
'highbrow', and much of the criticism of Hughes' approach 
came from within the Ellington camp. But this European 
tour was a good thing for Ellington, as is shown by his state 
ment, 'The main thing I got in Europe was spirit; it lifted 
me out of a bad groove. That kind of thing gives you 
courage to go on. If they think I'm that important, then 
maybe I have kinda said something; maybe our music 
does mean something.' 1 

1 Barry TJlanov, Duke Ellington, p. 151 (Musicians Press, 1947). 

14 



Although in 1932 he was given the annual award by the 
New York Schools of Music for his Creole Rhapsody, the 
activities of Ellington's band were still largely confined to 
appearances at the larger night clubs and at dances. In the 
autumn of 1933 they made their first tour of the South and 
in 1934 he took part in a number of films Murder at the 
Vanities, Belle of the 'POs (with Mae West) and Symphony 
in Black. This was the year in which Constant Lambert's 
study of twentieth-century music, Music Ho!, was published, 
during the course of which he made the now famous state 
ment that there is 'nothing in Ravel so dexterous in treat 
ment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient Hot 
and Bothered and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic 
than the final section 9 . 1 During the time this book was pub 
lished Ellington was engaged in playing dances for Jim 
Crow audiences in America's Southern States, and leading 
his band in brief snatches of third-rate films ! 

In Christmas week 1934 a new and important voice 
was added to the trumpet section, that of Rex Stewart, 
who replaced the ailing Freddy Jenkins. A veteran jazz 
man, Stewart had played for several years with the famous 
Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, in addition to spells with 
McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Luis Russell. Rex is a 
musician who has been constantly underestimated by the 
critics, both in his achievements and his influence. Roy 
Eldridge has stated that Rex was one of the musicians who 
influenced his playing, whilst traces of the Stewart manner 
can be found in such diverse musicians as Taft Jordan and 
Clark Terry. As a voice in the Ellington Orchestra, Stewart's 
work was invaluable in its versatility, for he commanded 
virtually every style of jazz trumpet, including a masterly 
adaptation of the Bubber Miley growl style, and a manner 
which he devised himself of playing with the valves of the 
instrument half depressed. The partnership of Cootie Wil 
liams and Rex Stewart in the Duke Ellington brass section 
from 1935 to 1940 was one of the greatest in jazz history. 

1 Constant Lambert, Music Ho!, p. 156 (Faber & Faber, 1934, and Penguin 
Books, 1948). 

15 



In recent years both, men have suffered an undue neglect, 
yet a recent L.P. featuring the two of them together again 
shows them still to be amongst the very finest of jazz 
trumpet players. 1 

1935 saw the dawning of the so-called 4 swing era' which 
began with the success of Benny Goodman's first big band. 
Duke Ellington's name was so established that at first he 
was not considered to play the same type of music as the 
newly established bands of Goodman, Bob Crosby, Tommy 
Dorsey and Jimmy Lunceford. In addition to this factor 
it must be observed that the white bands throughout the 
'swing' period had the best publicity and the best jobs, at 
the expense of the coloured orchestras who were almost in 
variably superior in musical content. But the astute pub 
licity chief of the Irving Mills organization, Ned Williams, 
went to work to assure the public that Duke Ellington led 
a 'swing 9 orchestra, and soon the band was accepted by the 
public as such. In late 1935 bassist Wellman Braud left 
the orchestra, and it was a sign of the band's success that 
Ellington could afford for a few years to experiment with 
two bass players, Hayes Alvis and Billy Taylor. Both men 
worked with Ellington until 1938, but early in that year 
Alvis departed and Taylor remained with the band until 
the advent of Jimmy Blanton in October, 1939. 

Ellington had been told in 1933 that his mother was a 
sick woman but she refused to go into hospital when advised 
to do so. Finally she entered Providence Hospital, Detroit, 
a cancer sanatorium and research centre, early in 1935. 
Duke arranged his bookings so he could be near at hand 
and he was with her continuously during the last three 
days of her life. She died on May 27th, 1935, and her death 
was a great shock to Ellington 'I have no ambition left,* 
he told his friends. 'The bottom's out of everything.' It was 
in the months immediately after his mother's death that 
Ellington wrote Reminiscing in Tempo? by far the most 
ambitious composition in the jazz idiom at this date, run- 

1 The Big Challenge, American Jazztone J1268, 1957 (not available in 
England). 

16 



ning for some twelve minutes and covering four sides of tie 
then standard 10-inch 78 r.p.m. records. Critical reaction was 
hostile ; in America, John Hammond headed his review of 
the work 'The Tragedy of Duke Ellington'. In England ( 6 I 
wrote it just for them,' said Duke) Spike Hughes described 
it as a 'long rambling monstrosity', and Edgar Jackson 
said frankly that he did not understand the work. Leonard 
Bibbs also found it dull and meaningless at first, but c at 
the same time, I had too high an opinion of Duke to think 
he would willingly perpetuate anything like the pointless 
joke that this appeared to be . . .' So Hibbs listened to 
the work several times, finally coming to the conclusion 
that it was a significant and worthy piece of Ellingtonia. 
Would that other critics in the turbulent world of jazz 
might show such admirable modesty! 1 

In 1937 and 1938 Ellington was again associated with 
the Cotton Club, although he took time off to visit Holly 
wood and make another film, The Hit Parade, One of the 
numbers played in this film was Pve Got To Be A Rug Cutter, 
a typical title of the day, with a hastily improvised vocal 
trio of Harry Carney, Rex Stewart and Hayes Alvis ! Whilst 
on the West Coast the band played a concert at the Univer 
sity of California, which was the first of a series of concerts 
at various colleges and universities. But 1937 brought fur 
ther tragedy for Duke in his family life, for in early Novem 
ber of that year his father died. Once again he was thrown 
into the depths of depression and for a long time he did 
little or no composing. In this same year Arthur Whetsol, 
who had been a friend and associate of Ellington's right 
from the early days in Washington, left the band. After 
some shuffling around in the trumpet section Wallace 
Jones took over the first trumpet chair; although a lead 
man of great efficiency Jones was no soloist, and WhetsoFs 
delicate trumpet style was a considerable loss to the 

1 For further details of tlie critical reaction to Reminiscing in Tempo see 
Charles Fox in Duke Ellington^ pp. 89-90, edited by Peter Gammond (Phoenix 
House, 1958), and Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, pp. 164-6 (Musicians Press, 
1947). 

17 



orchestra. In 1938 Ellington wrote another concert work, 
The Blue Belles of Harlem, on a commission from Paul 
WMteman for a work for Ms orchestra. Although this was 
performed some years afterwards by the Ellington Orchestra 
at a Carnegie Hall Concert, it has unfortunately never been 
recorded. 

In the spring of 1939 Duke was married to Bea Ellis, 
shortly after his divorce from his second wife, Mildred. 
Another long-standing partnership was broken when Ell 
ington split with Irving Mills, signing a new contract with 
the William Morris agency, and in March of this year Elling 
ton sailed for Europe, this time having to miss out England 
owing to union restrictions. On the eve of the Second World 
War the Ellington band covered France, Belgium, Holland, 
Denmark and Sweden in a thirty-four-day concert tour. 
The tour was a success in every way, and, to add to the 
frustration of English jazz enthusiasts who were unable to 
hear the band, the musicians called at London on their way 
back to the U.S. 

IV 

Before leaving for Europe the band had recorded a song 
called Something to Live For, an Ellington composition with 
lyrics by a young lyric-writer and musician, Billy Stray- 
horn. Legend has it that Strayhorn was hired by Duke 
purely as a lyric writer and that, whilst the band was away 
in Europe, the young man became fascinated by the Elling 
ton scores which he studied with great interest and enthusi 
asm. In actual fact Strayhorn had done some scoring for 
small band dates by the Johnny Hodges contingent before 
the band's departure. We may deduce from this that Duke 
already had his mind on the idea of letting this highly 
talented young musician do some of the scoring for the full 
orchestra. Billy Strayhorn's compositions became a regular 
feature of the band's repertoire. Apart from such well-known 
numbers as Take The 'A* Train, Midriff and Day Dream, 
he is joint composer of several of the longer concert works, 

18 



such as The Perfume Suite and Such Sweet Thunder. Like 
Ellington himself, lie has always paid great attention to the 
musical character of the men in the band, and it is often im 
possible to tell whether a number is an Ellington original or 
a Strayhorn composition, so closely has the younger man 
assimilated the Ellington manner. Yet no other musician in 
jazz has ever been able to achieve anything sounding re 
motely like the 'Ellington effect 9 , as Strayhorn himself 
terms it ! It was Strayhorn who coined the well known and 
very perceptive saying : 'Ellington plays the piano, but his 
real instrument is his band.' 

Later in 1939 two other important additions were made 
to the Ellington band when Duke increased his sax section 
to five pieces with the addition of the Kansas City tenor 
player Ben Webster, and bassist Billy Taylor was re 
placed by Jimmy Blanton. From being the least important 
member of the reed section, the tenor saxophone had de 
veloped under the influence of that great musician, Cole- 
man Hawkins, to a position where it challenged the trum 
pet as the most important solo instrument in jazz. Every 
large band, except Ellington's, had by this time at least 
one tenor saxophone soloist of distinction, and the Count 
Basie Band had two, in Lester Young and Herchel Evans, 
whose contrasting styles were an outstanding feature of the 
Basie group of this time. The only tenor with Duke was 
clarinettist Barney Bigard, who rarely played the instru 
ment solo, and then in a rhapsodic manner. In Ben Web 
ster Ellington not only selected a musician who is amongst 
the finest of jazz soloists, but he added a fifth voice to his 
reed section, which meant further harmonic scope for his 
writing. Duke discovered another remarkable musician in 
Jimmy Blanton, who was only eighteen when he joined 
Ellington in December, 1939. His tragic death from tuber 
culosis in January, 1942, gave him less than two years in 
the public eye, yet he is unquestionably the most famous 
bass player in jazz. He not only revolutionized jazz bass 
playing, but he set a standard which has never been equalled 
by any of the fine musicians who have been influenced by 

19 



Mm. Blanton raised the string bass to the standard of a solo 
instrument, the richness of his melodic line on such records 
as Jack the Bear and Sepia Panorama being truly breath 
taking, whilst the range of inflexion he achieved on pizzi 
cato bass is equally fantastic. The addition of Webster and 
Blanton commenced what was perhaps the greatest period 
Ellington has ever had as a bandleader, his fifteen-piece 
orchestra containing a magnificent array of varied solo 
talent. 1940 was one of his peak years as a composer, and 
amongst the timeless masterpieces recorded during this 
year are Jack the Bear, Ko-Ko, Concerto for Cootie, Cotton 
Tail, Never No Lament, Dusk, Bojangles, A Portrait of Ben 
Williams, Blue Goose, Harlem Air Shaft, Sepia Panorama, 
In a Mellotone, Warm Valley and Across the Track Blues. 
The personnel of the Duke Ellington Orchestra at this time 
makes extraordinary reading, for in its solo strength alone 
(which after all is only one facet of the music of this orchestra) 
it has never been equalled by any ensemble in jazz. The 
trumpets were Wallace Jones, Cootie Williams and Rex 
Stewart, the latter having by this time switched to cornet; 
on trombones Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown and Juan 
Tizol, the latter on valve trombone; the reeds were Otto 
Hardwicke (alto sax), Johnny Hodges (alto and soprano 
saxes), Barney Bigard (clarinet and tenor sax), Ben Web 
ster (tenor sax) and Harry Carney (baritone sax and bass 
clarinet) ; Ellington himself of course was on piano, and his 
work at this period as a band pianist reached a new standard, 
whilst the rhythm section was completed by Fred Guy 
(guitar), Jimmy Blanton (bass) and Sonny Greer (drums). 
An all-star band indeed ! 

Although in the years which followed Ellington has 
always led a band of remarkable quality, the 1940 band does 
represent one of the high-water marks of his career. The 
first member of this group to leave was Cootie Williams, 
who had been with Ellington for over eleven years. He was 
replaced by Ray Nance in December, 1940. Loud were the 
cries of horror from the band's admirers when the news 
was heard. Both amongst the fans and fellow musicians 
20 



there were nratterings foretelling the doom of the Elling 
ton band. Raymond Scott, leader of a light music aggre 
gation somewhere on the boundaries of jazz, wrote a dirge 
called When Cootie Left the Duke and this sums up very well 
prevailing opinions of the time. Eighteen years later, with 
Duke Ellington still the foremost figure in jazz, this seems 
absurd, yet Cootie Williams had been a leading figure in 
the ensemble ever since he replaced Bubber Miley in 1929, 
and his commanding trumpet was to many listeners both 
the most distinctive solo voice in the band and a formidable 
link with the orchestra's glorious past. Within the Ellington 
organization things were not quite so gloomy, as the talented 
Ray Nance had joined the orchestra and the flow of great 
music was carried on without a pause. Williams' section 
mate, Rex Stewart, was an equally adept practitioner of 
the growl style, although perhaps not so well known as 
Cootie. As Nance was also a fine soloist on trumpet, in 
addition to being a proficient violinist and amusing vocalist, 
the loss was not so great as had been feared. In September, 
1941, Jimmy Blanton's terrible illness compelled him to 
leave the band and his immediate replacement was Jimmy 
Bryant, who stayed only a few months before being suc 
ceeded by Junior Raglin. The following year another main 
stay of the band departed in the person of Barney Bigard, 
and for a year the clarinet chair was filled by Chauncey 
Haughton, a soloist of little distinction, until he in turn 
was replaced by Jimmy Hamilton in 1943. The trumpet 
section was increased to four with the addition of Harold 
Baker, a distinguished lead man and lyrical solist. 

In January, 1943, a 'Duke Ellington Week' was held to 
celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Ellington's debut 
in New York and it concluded with a concert by the band in 
Carnegie Hall, the first of what was to become an annual 
series. The centrepiece of this concert was a new extended 
composition by Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige, which 
ran for forty-five minutes. The critical reaction to this 
work was mixed, and, owing to a recording ban being in 
force at this time, it was never recorded in its entirety. 

21 



A suite from Black, Brown and Beige was recorded in 1944 
and more recently two of the movements from this suite 
Work Song and Come Sunday have received extended 
treatment on L.P. The complete programme played by 
Ellington at this first Carnegie Hall concert makes interest 
ing reading today. It was as follows : 

Black and Tan Fantasy 

Rockiri* in Rhythm 

Moon Mist 

Jumpiri* Punkins 

A Portrait of Bert Williams 

Bojangles 

Black Beauty (announced as A Portrait of Florence 

Mills) 

Black, Brown and Beige 
Ko-Ko 

Dirge (a Strayhorn composition, not recorded) 
Stomp (actually Strayhorn's Johnny Come Lately) 
Are You Sticking (featuring Chauncey Haughton) 
Bakiff (featuring Juan Tizol and Ray Nance) 
Jack the Bear (featuring Junior Raglin) 
Blue Belles of Harlem (featuring Ellington on piano) 
Day Dream (featuring Johnny Hodges) 
Rose of the Rio Grande (featuring Lawrence Brown) 
Boy Meets Horn (featuring Rex Stewart) 
Don't Get Around Much any More (a popular adapta 
tion of Never No Lament which was something of a 
'hit') 
Goiri* Up 
Mood Indigo 

The penultimate number was featured briefly in Cabin in 
the Sky in which the band had appeared in 1942. A more 
significant all-coloured enterprise, the show Jump for Joy 
featured an Ellington score and the Ellington orchestra 
for three months in 1941, with spots for the band's soloists, 
such as Rex's Concerto for Klinkers, an unrecorded successor 
22 



to Boy Meets Horn. Ellington has dabbled from time to time 
in writing music for shows, for one of which, Man With 
Four Sides, he also wrote the book. 

The personnel changes which were becoming ever more 
frequent continued in 1943, the most significant of these 
being the departure of Ben Webster, who was replaced by 
Al Sears, a capable but less distinguished tenor sax soloist. 
The trumpet section was in a state of considerable turmoil; 
Rex Stewart leaving fcr a short period and being replaced 
by Taft Jordan; Wallace Jones leaving and the lead trum 
pet chair being taken over by Shelton Hemphill. A little- 
known trumpet player by the name of Dizzy Gillespie 
played for a few weeks with the band in November of this 
same year. The success of the first Carnegie Hall appearance 
had been so great that the band was booked again in this 
famous hall for a second Ellington concert in December, 
1943: Blacky Brown and Beige was given again, but this 
time in the shortened form we know from records. It is 
said that the general hostility of the critics persuaded 
Ellington to adopt this course, and the same reason is given 
for the quick withdrawal from the band's repertoire of the 
new work performed at the December, 1943, concert New 
World A-Comin\ 



Due to a dispute between the American Federation of 
Musicians and the recording companies there had been no 
Ellington recordings (apart from the forces* *V-Discs') 
from July, 1942 until December, 1944. It was in this latter 
month that JKacfc, Brown and Beige was recorded, and by 
this time further changes had taken place. Cat Anderson 
had replaced Harold Baker, and Claude Jones had come in 
on trombone for Juan Tizol. Rex Stewart returned to the 
band, thus increasing the trumpets to five, whilst in the 
reeds, Otto Hardwicke, one of the oldest members of the 
orchestra, was replaced by Russell Procope, a veteran of 
the Chick Webb, Fletcher Henderson and Teddy Hill 
bands. In 1946 a fourth trombone was added in the person 

23 



of Wilbur de Paris, and Oscar Pettiford replaced Junior 
Raglin on bass. This rapid changing of personnel, a common 
enough feature with other large bands, was in marked con 
trast to the stability of the Ellington orchestra up to about 
1941. In spite of this the band's character was not im 
paired and the recordings from this period contain many 
outstanding works. A new venture for Ellington was the 
employment of an academic soprano in the person of Kay 
Davis, At first she was used in wordless accompaniment 
to other singers in such numbers as I Ain't Got Nothin But 
the Blues and Solitude, but soon Ellington was to score a 
number of special compositions built round Kay's voice, 
such as Transblucency and On a Turquoise Cloud. In 1946 
Tricky Sam Wanton died, and the Ellington Orchestra lost 
another distinctive voice. In August, 1947, Tyree Glenn 
replaced Wilbur de Paris in the trombone section; apart 
from being a fine soloist on open trombone and a proficient 
vibraphone player, Tyree took over the 6 wa-wa 9 solos with 
the band in an individual variant of the style established 
by Nanton. 

The annual appearances at Carnegie Hall continued and 
the orchestra were playing an increasing number of con 
certs throughout the U.S.A. It was a productive period in 
Ellington's concert writing, The Deep South Suite being 
premiered at Carnegie Hall in November, 1946, and the 
Liberian Suite, which was commissioned by the govern 
ment of the small West African republic, in December of the 
following year. In 1948 another recording ban kept the 
band out of the studios for a few months and during this 
time Al Sears departed and Ben Webster returned for a 
brief stay. In the summer of this year Ellington made a short 
tour of England, but owing to the ban imposed by the 
Musicians' Union he was unable to bring bis band. There 
fore he disbanded for a few months and toured with only 
Ray Nance and Kay Davis, of bis own musicians, accom 
panied by a British rhythm section consisting of Malcolm 
Mitchell (guitar), Jack Fallon (bass) and Tony Crombie 
(drums). They were classified as variety artists rather than 
24 



musicians, and the reaction amongst jazz enthusiasts was 
bitter indeed when it was realized that but for such restric 
tions they would have been listening to the full Ellington 
Orchestra, rather than just the augmented trio as part of 
a variety bill or conceit package. 

The course of the Ellington orchestra during 1949 and 
1950 is hard to plot, the changes within the band being so 
numerous. It is impossible to list these in detail in a book of 
this size, but the situation can be summarized briefly. 
Fred Guy left and was not replaced, Ellington having sub 
sequently kept his rhythm section down to three pieces. 
Ben Webster had not stayed long and the matter of a tenor 
soloist was not settled until Paul Gonsalves, who had pre 
viously played with Count Basie, joined in late 1950. The 
trumpets wavered between four and five pieces, sometimes 
the band having to carry two lead men owing to Al Killian's 
lip trouble. Quentin Jackson came to the trombone section 
in place of Claude Jones, but Tyree Glenn ceased to be a 
regular member of the band. For the European tour of 
1950 (with the full band this time, but omitting England 
from the itinerary owing to the union ban) Ellington was 
without Tyree Glenn and he brought two drummers with 
him, Greer and Butch Ballard. The tenor sax chair was 
vacant so he signed up ex-Basie tenor man Don Byas, who 
was resident in Europe, for the duration of the tour. Oscar 
Pettiford had left and been replaced by Wendell Marshall, 
cousin of the late Jimmy Blanton into whose old chair he 
now moved. This was a bad period for big bands and both 
Count Basie and Woody Herman, Duke's keenest rivals 
since the mid-forties, had been forced to disband their 
groups. In February, 1950, he was presented with an award 
from the magazine Downbeat, in addition to which he was 
presented with a parchment scroll commemorating the fact 
that Ms was the only leading band from the magazine's 
1949 poll still in existence ! 

On January 21st, 1951, Ellington gave a concert at tte 
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in aid of the Na 
tional Association for the Advancement of Coloured 

25 



People. The centrepiece of the programme was Ellington's 
new Harlem Suite, his first large-scale composition for some 
years. As long playing records were now a prominent 
feature of the record industry it was to be expected that the 
Harlem Suite would fare better than such predecessors as 
New World A-Comin? and The Deep South Suite which had 
not been recorded. But before the expected recording 
session took place the Ellington orchestra underwent the 
greatest upheaval of its entire career, three key men in 
Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown and Sonny Greer giving 
in their notice. During the constant shuffling of the pre 
vious few years these men, along with Ray Nance and 
Harry Carney, had comprised a nucleus of long-serving 
sidemen. Hodges had been with Duke since 1928; Brown 
since 1932; whilst Greer was the last survivor of Duke's 
Washington days, a musician who had been associated 
with him for over thirty years. From the time Lawrence 
Brown joined the band in 1932, the cry had periodically 
been raised that Ellington was finished, but now even the 
most devoted of the band's followers were perturbed. 
Greer's drumming had latterly been very uneven (hence 
the second drummer on the European trip the preceding 
year), but Brown was a long-established solo voice in the 
orchestra and Hodges was by far the finest soloist on whom 
Ellington could call. Hasty replacements were made, only 
one being of a permanent nature in trombonist Britt 
Woodman who came in for Brown; but even here the situa 
tion was still critical as no permanent replacement had 
been found for Tyree Glenn, who had played only occa 
sionally with the band during the previous year. Help 
came a month after the departure of the three key men, 
from a rather unexpected source. When he left the Elling 
ton orchestra in 1944, Juan Tizol joined the Harry James 
orchestra, and in March, 1951, Ellington not only per 
suaded Tizol to rejoin the band but also to bring over two 
jazzmen of note from the James band, in the persons of 
Willie Smith and Louis Bellson. Altoist Willie Smith had 
been for some years a mainstay of the Jimmie Lunceford 
26 







Melody Maker 
Duke Ellington during his early years as a bandleader 




Melody Maker 
The Duke Ellington Orchestra in the 1930s 

Front row: Wellman Brand (bass), Duke Ellington (piano). Second 
row: Otto Hardwicke, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Barney 
Bigard (saxes), Fred Guy (guitar). Third TOW: Joe Nanton, Juan 
Tizol, Lawrence Brown (trombones), Cootie Williams, Arthur 
Whetsol, Freddy Jenkins (trumpets). Rear: Sonny Greer (drums) 



band and, although prone to a certain vulgarity in long 
solos, he is one of the finest leaders of the saxophone section 
in jazz. Drummer Lows Bellson may not have Greer's flair 
for coloration, hiit he is a drummer of considerahie drive, 
whilst Tizol, though no jazz soloist, made a welcome return 
to the band both for his impeccable section playing and for 
his distinctive way of playing the Latin- American numbers 
he had written for the band. Although, from the point 
of view of solo jazz or new compositions, this was not 
one of Ellington's greatest periods, there is no doubt 
that a new spirit was alive in the band at this time. Cat 
Anderson had returned to the band, and with his talents 
as a high note specialist, Ray Nance's incredible singing 
and dancing, and the skilled drum solos of Louis Bellson, 
Ellington's band was a popular concert attraction wherever 
they played, containing as it did three certain show- 
stoppers. 

VI 

In May, 1951, the band played a concert held in aid of 
the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund in New York, and for 
the second half they combined with the NBC Symphony 
Orchestra in performances of Ellington's New World 
A-comin' and Harlem Suite in arrangements by Luther 
Henderson. This last work was recorded under the title 
A Tone Parallel to Harlem in December of that year, by 
which time the trumpet section was undergoing further 
changes, but by early 1952 it had settled to a regular four- 
man team of Ray Nance, Cat Anderson, Clark Terry and 
Willie Cook, which was to remain unchanged until late in 
1957. The other sections continued to undergo changes, 
however, Willie Smith leaving in June, 1952, to be replaced 
by Hilton Jefferson, who stayed only six months. He in 
turn gave way to Rick Henderson, a young musician with 
a considerable Charlie Parker influence in his style. Back 
in the 1940s bassist Oscar Pettiford had tried to persuade 
Ellington to employ several of the bop stylists, but it was 
not until Clark Terry entered the band in 1951 that Elling- 

27 



ton employed any 'modern' soloists. Unlike so many of the 
stereotyped modern jazzmen, Clark Terry is too individual 
a musician to be passed off with any period tag. A soloist of 
unusual distinction, his tone is too warm, his style too 
witty to be classified with the zombie music of the cool 
musicians. In January of 1953 Louis Bellson was replaced 
by Butch Ballard, the drummer who had travelled to 
Europe as Sonny Greer's deputy in 1950. At this time 
Ellington was recording for the Capitol label, and in June, 
1953, he recorded an album of piano solos a very unusual 
departure for him. The constant changes of personnel were 
unquestionably having an effect on the band's music, and 
jazz 'standards', arranged by men outside the Ellington 
organization, were a prominent feature of the book around 
this time. An album consisting of such material, along with 
three new recordings of old Ellington numbers, were col 
lected from a number of sessions in 1953 and 1954 and issued 
under the title Ellington '55. By this time Tizol was out and 
Ballard had given way to Dave Black on drums. Despite 
the personnel changes and the outside material, jazz critics 
were agreed that Ellington '55 was one of the oustanding 
big band L.P.s for years. It is interesting to note that at a 
concert at Pasadena in March, 1953, Duke played his old 
1937 composition Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, with 
a five-minute tenor solo for Paul Gonsalves sandwiched 
in between the two movements the same arrangement 
which was to provoke a near riot at the Newport Jazz 
Festival more than three years later. 

The situation as far as Ellington's recordings were con 
cerned was far from healthy around this time, such hit 
parade material as Bunny Hop Mambo and Twelfth Street 
Rag Mambo being recorded by the band. Ellington had 
complained earlier to Leonard Feather that no one cared 
who was in the band any more and that the only reason he 
had the highest payroll in the world was that he liked to 
listen to the band himself. Although a new Ellington com 
position, Night Creature, was played by the band and The 
Symphony of the Air at a Carnegie Hall concert in March, 
28 



1955, the situation seems, on the whole, to have worsened. 
In the sum. nner of that year the band worked for several 
months in the Aquacade show at Flushing Meadows, Long 
Island, and Ellington not only allowed the band to be aug 
mented by a second pianist, a string section and two girl 
harpists, but several of his musicians were unable to play 
in the show owing to union troubles Willie Cook, Britt 
Woodman, Rick Henderson, Paul Gonsalves and Dave 
Black missing this lengthy engagement. Once again the cry 
went up that the band was finished, but within a year 
Ellington was to lead one of the very finest bands of his 
entire career thus does Duke confound the critics at every 
turn! 

In early 1955 Jimmy Woode replaced Wendell Marshall 
on bass, and a new drummer, Sam Woodyard, teamed with 
him to provide a well integrated rhythm section, but the 
most important change of all was the return of the great 
Johnny Hodges in place of Rick Henderson. With John 
Sanders filling the trombone chair vacated by Juan Tizol, 
Ellington had once more assembled a band of the highest 
potential; it was the first time for many years that his or 
chestra could be compared, in the number and variety of 
soloists, with his bands up to the middle 'forties. An Elling 
ton renaissance was due and for those who had followed the 
orchestra's fortunes through the years this was announced 
by a new L.P. recorded in February, 1956: Historically 
Speaking, the Duke. Covering in chronological order thirty 
years of Ellington compositions, the band's performance on 
this L.P. confirmed that Ellington had once more a suitably 
talented group of musicians to interpret his work. The 
opening number of this L.P. was the thirty-year-old score of 
East St. Louis Toodle-oo, a remarkable instance of the per 
manent value of Ellington's writing. As Paul Rossiter re 
marked in reviewing the record in Jazz Monthly , \ . . what 
other leader would dare use a thirty-year-old score today?' 
At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival the band scored a tre 
mendous success, provoking a near riot with the perform 
ance of the nineteen-year-old Diminuendo and Crescendo in 

29 



e, with a long tenor solo for Paul Gonsalves generating 
an exciting atmosphere. In the same year the band played 
at the Shakespearian Festival at Stratford, Ontario, and 
Ellington was so pleased with the reception he and the band 
received at this event that he planned to write a Shake 
spearian suite in appreciation. In this year he also wrote 
and narrated a TV production for the orchestra, several 
solo singers and a full choir the highly controversial work, 
A Drum is a Woman, a parallel to the history of jazz, which 
was conceived in a characteristically satirical vein. 

The following year saw the first performance of his 
Shakespearian suite, Such Sweet Thunder, dedicated to the 
Shakespearian Festival, and which proved to be one of his 
finest concert works. Late in 1957, Harold Baker returned 
to the trumpet section, replacing Willie Cook, and, after 
scoring a further success at the Newport Festival of 1958, 
the band set sail for its fourth European tour. By this time 
the British Musicians* Union had agreed to let in American 
bands on an exchange basis and, to the delight of British 
jazz lovers, the Ellington band played Its first concert in 
this country since 1933 when they opened the tour at the 
Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, October 5th, 1958. Again 
there were strong criticisms of the band's performances, 
but this time on the basis of too many solo features, as 
opposed to band interpretations of Ellington compositions. 
While it is true that there were several points at which the 
performances on this tour could be criticized when com 
pared with the recorded output of the band, there could be 
little doubt that here was the greatest jazz orchestra of the 
Jay as it had been for over thirty long years. Every 
musician in the band proved his solo capabilities, and the 
ensemble playing through the great variety of scores Elling 
ton presented at each concert was perfect. The personnel of 
the present Duke Ellington Orchestra is given below, with 
the dates of each man's stay with the band in parenthesis : 

Ray Nance Trumpet, violin, vocal (1940-present). 
Cat Anderson Trumpet (1944-1947, 1950-present). 

30 



Harold Baker Trumpet (1938, 1942-1944, 1946-1951, 

1957-present). 

Clark Terry Trumpet (1951-present). 
Britt Woodman Trombone (1951-present). 
Quentin Jackson Trombone (1949-present). 
John Sanders Trombone (1954-p resent). 
Russell Procope Alto, clarinet (1945-present). 
Johnny Hodges Alto (1928-1951, 1955-present). 
Jimmy Hamilton Tenor, clarinet (1943-present). 
Paul Gonsalves Tenor (1950-present). 
Harry Carney Baritone, bass clarinet (1926-present). 
Jimmy Woode Bass (1955 present). 
Sam Woodyard Drums (1955-present). 

The vocalist on the 1958 tour of England was Ozzie Bailey 
(who is to be heard on the Drum is a Woman L.P.), and 
Billy Strayhorn also travelled with the band. When not 
delivering his witty announcements or directing the or 
chestra, Duke Ellington sat at the piano and demonstrated 
his great skill as a band pianist, and as a band leader in the 
truest sense of the term. 

VII 

To have survived over thirty years as a big name in 
American show business; to have directed, during the whole 
of this period, a jazz orchestra of matchless skill; to have 
composed hundreds of pieces from popular songs like Soli 
tude or Tra Beginning to See the Light, to full-scale concert 
works such as the Harlem Suite or Such Sweet Thunder, in 
addition to such comparatively minor achievements as 
being one of the very finest band pianists in jazz and the 
writer of several scores for musicals ; to have done all this 
and still remain a relaxed and unruffled individual, Duke 
Ellington indeed must be a remarkable man. Unlike most 
other bandleaders Duke is easy on discipline. His manager 
once tried to persuade HTTI to take a stronger line on the 
matter of advances on the musicians' salaries, and Duke re- 

31 



plied, 'I won't let these goddam musicians upset me ! Why 
should I knock myself out in an argument about fifteen 
dollars when in the same time I can probably write a fifteen- 
hundred dollar song?' 1 He retains a perfect calm through 
the most difficult situations one of his musicians once 
claimed that 'his pulse is so low he can't get excited, his 
heart beats slower than an ordinary man's'. 2 Duke himself 
says, 'You see, I don't worry any more. Everybody thinks 
those great circles under my eyes are the result of worry. 
No, no ! My bags are the accumulation of virtue and a few 
hearty laughs. I don't worry.' 3 His calm is reflected in his 
easy manner and his composure, the loose discipline reaps 
its reward in the way his musicians are always themselves. 
Never in the most complex Ellington scores does one hear 
a mere 'trumpet solo' or 6 alto solo' the part is written not 
for the instrument, but for the man; for Clark Terry or 
Cootie Williams, for Barney Bigard or Jimmy Hamilton. 
Such creative participation by the bandsmen could hardly 
be demanded of them, or enforced by discipline. Tales of the 
Ellington musicians turning up late for dates are legion (at 
the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, four of the band were 
absent during the opening set), but the Duke knows that a 
rigid, uniform discipline will produce rigid and uniform 
musicianship, and that is the last thing he requires from his 
band. The musicians respect him for this, as is shown from 
Ben Webster's statement: c Duke is a great guy to work for. 
He understands musicians better than any leader. He's 
quick to judge a man's ability accurately, and he can write 
a piece or concerto for him that will fit the individual man.' 4 
Ellington is a man who believes strongly in the integrity 
of the individual, his output throughout the years always 
bearing the imprint of his own strong personality. When 
asked a few years ago if he would consider using strings 

1 Richard 0. Boyer, The Hot Bach, p. 25, reprinted in Duke Ellington, 
edited by Peter Gammond (Phoenix House, 1958). 

Ibid., p. 35. 

3 Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 270 (Musicians Press, 1947). 

* Quoted by Stanley Dance in Duke Ellington, p. 18, edited by Peter Gam 
mond (Phoenix House, 1958). 

32 



with his band, as certain other jazz leaders had done, 
he replied, 'Strings? Positively no! What on earth would 
I want with strings? What can anybody do with strings 
that hasn't been done wonderfully for hundreds of years ? 
No, we always want to play Ellington music that's an 
accepted thing in itself.' 1 

Duke Ellington is an American Negro, and the sometimes 
bitter and humiliating treatment handed out to him by the 
apostles of 'white supremacy 9 can never have been a helpful 
factor during his long career. But this very career has been 
a triumphant acclamation of the rights of his people, 
amongst whom he is a highly respected figure. He holds the 
respect not only of fellow jazz musicians but of men. dis 
tinguished in the world of European concert music. His use 
of Shakespearian characters as well as Negro work-songs 
as subjects for his works show the all-embracing versatility 
of his mind and art. Duke Ellington, drawing at all times 
on the great musical traditions of his people, has raised his 
music to a universal level, and the genius which he has 
brought to his work is of such a magnitude that he has 
become one of the great artists of the twentieth century, 
the quality of whose prodigious output would be difficult to 
match in any field of artistic creation. 



1 Quoted by Ainu Morgan from an interview with Leonard Feather in Down" 
beat. See Duke Ellington, p. 114, edited by Peter Gammond (Phoenix House, 
1958). 

33 



2. THE MUSIC 



The major figures in jazz have, with very few exceptions, 
achieved their eminence through the medium of the solo, 
the ensemble usually being a background before which the 
soloist creates the essential drama or comedy of the work. 
The serene, almost mystical poise of Louis Armstrong's 
greatest work, the profuse, richly creative playing of Cole- 
man Hawkins, and the agonized contours of the incredibly 
inventive Charlie Parker, all belong to this standard medium 
of jazz expression. Many of the finest big bands in jazz have 
been dance orchestras with talented arrangers and soloists 
who have raised their music above a purely functional level, 
such bands as those of Chick Webb and Jimmy Lunceford 
being the best examples of this type. The orchestra of Count 
Basie in the 1950s is another example, but in its earlier 
years the Basie band had a somewhat different pattern. 
Working with simple arrangements this ensemble was able 
to carry over into the big band a fire and spontaneity more 
usually associated with small groups, whilst throwing the 
main emphasis on such great soloists as Lester Young, 
Herchel Evans, Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells and Harry 
Edison. 

These then are the principal vehicles for expression in 
jazz: the soloist, working either with a small group of 
sympathetic musicians or within the framework of a large 
orchestra, and the arranger, who usually provides in his 
34 



scores ample room for individual solos from the members of 
the band. In a band of the Webb Limceford type the ar 
rangement is primarily the vehicle of the band's ensemble 
ability, in a musical rather than a purely technical sense. 
Even the best of jazz arrangements, such as those by Sy 
Oliver for the Lunceford band or those by Neil Hefti for the 
current Basie orchestra, have a low value as compositions, 
requiring the interpretation of a great ensemble to give them 
validity. On the other hand the creations of the great soloists 
of jazz have far more compositional unity than the arran 
gers* scores : compare Armstrong's Potato Head Blues solos or 
the alto work in Parker's Mood with the best arranged jazz, 
and the difference in terms of musical substance and struc 
ture becomes obvious. 

The achievements of Duke Ellington are different from 
those of other jazz musicians not only in quality, but are of 
an entirely different order. His orchestra has contained in 
its ranks a large number of soloists of the highest calibre 
even in his best years Basie could not surpass Ellington in 
this respect and the context for their work provided by 
the ensemble is clearly superior to that of any other band in 
jazz; but the unique quality of Ellington's output lies in his 
compositions, which are the only jazz scores which in terms 
of subtlety and structure can be considered important 
arstistic creations in themselves. The constant emphasis 
which is placed upon his compositional achievements should 
not cloud the listener's understanding of the distinction 
between composition in the academic sense and the means 
Ellington uses. The European composer writes for a par 
ticular instrument or group of instruments and knows, from 
the standardization of instrumental techniques within the 
European tradition, that pretty well the same sound will 
result from the playing of his scores by any one of a hundred 
symphony orchestras. The conductor's interpretation and 
the very slight variants in instrumental techniques between 
musicians of different nationalities are of course variable 
factors, but they are small indeed when compared with the 
highly individual approach of the jazz musician to his 

35 



instrument. The latter is of course in most cases a creative 
artist himself, and will interpret his part within the frame 
work of his own style. The likelihood of successful com 
position becoming a frequent achievement in jazz is there 
fore remote, for the standardization of instrumental usage 
that this would entail would rob the music of many of its 
most valuable characteristics. Duke Ellington's genius is 
many-sided, and his unique qualities as a bandleader 
have enabled him to create in his orchestra a medium for 
his compositions, without in any way impairing the in 
dividuality of the jazzmen within the band. In Jack the 
Bear (1940), Ellington builds a work entirely round his 
soloists, a composition which is typical of its creator while 
remaining a suitable vehicle for the solosts. This is true of 
all Ellington's best work, but Jack the Bear is a particularly 
good example as the ensemble is only heard briefly in other 
than an accompanying role. His understanding of the 
musical character of the bandsmen has made it possible for 
Ellington to use his musicians in this way. It is interesting 
to follow on records the introduction of each new voice into 
the Ellington band, and the increasingly important parts 
each new soloist is given as Duke grows to know his style. 

II 

Although Duke Ellington made a few records in 1925 and 
1926 (some with his regular band), the first really distinc 
tive recordings are those from 1927, a year which saw the 
recording of three pieces still performed by the Ellington 
orchestra today East St. Louis Toodle~oo, Black and Tan 
Fantasy and Creole Love Call The first two are clearly 
achievements of the Duke Ellington-Bubber Miley partner 
ship, the style of the trumpeter setting the mood whilst the 
manner in which the material is organized is obviously 
Ellington's contribution. East St. Louis Toodle-oo opens 
with what sounds like a slowed-down fugue subject in minims 
played by the saxophone section, which becomes the 
accompaniment to Miley 's solo. The piece is cast in the 
36 



conventional thirty-two bar song form, and the exposition 
of the main theme is played by Miley in the first eight bars 
of his solo. The melodic line is characteristic of Miley, with 
its stuttering, vocalized, repeated notes and unexpected 
stresses. The second eight bars is a variant hinting both 
rhythmically and melodically at the change of atmosphere 
to be found in the release or middle eight, which bursts out 
in a totally different mood of exuberance expressed both 
by the solo trumpet and in the changed accompaniment. 
The brooding atmosphere created by the heavy tread of the 
saxophone melody is replaced by a slight echo of the trum 
pet line on Nanton's trombone, the rhythm section also 
seeming lighter when freed from the lugubrious measure of 
the saxophones. The final section of this chorus returns to 
the original theme and mood, the following choruses featur 
ing solos based on a contrasting theme which is stated by 
the brass section after the solo variations. Neither the rather 
obviously jaunty tune nor the ordinary sounding solos have 
the substance to be other than a mere contrast to the open 
ing chorus, and it is only when Miley recapitulates the open 
ing theme in the final eight bars that the record again 
achieves a distinctive sound what goes on in between be 
ing typical big band jazz of the period. In the Victor-H.M.V. 
version of East St. Louis Toodle-oo (by far the best) Nan- 
ton's solo has considerable vigour but little melodic dis 
tinction, the other solos by Hardwicke and Jackson adding 
little to the work as a whole. 

The best solution to the problems set by Ms orchestra at 
this time is found in Black and Tan Fantasy , which achieves 
a remarkable unity with apparently diverse elements. The 
work opens with a Hues theme in the minor played by Miley 
and Nanton over a marching beat from the rhythm section ; 
this twelve-bar theme is followed by a sixteen-bar melody 
played in a voluptuous manner by Otto Hardwicke on alto 
sax. The music pauses for a moment after this episode, then 
we return to the twelve-bar blues form for a two-chorus 
solo by Miley, commencing with a long held high C. Ell ing- 
ton's ragtime-flavoured piano takes a chorus, followed by 

37 



Nanton on muted trombone who re-establishes the rather 
sombre mood of Miley's contribution. Finally Bubber re 
turns with a chorus which raises the pulse of the music to 
an almost exultant note, only to lead to the famous coda, 
which is a quotation from Chopin's Funeral March. The two 
finest early versions of Black and Tan Fantasy are the 
Brunswick of April 7th, 1927 and the Victor-H.M.V. of 
October 26th, 1927, the former having an altogether mor^e 
dignified, more sombre sound when compared with the 
October version, in which at times the exuberance of the 
performance seems about to destroy the mood of the piece. 
Miley's two-chorus solo, one of his finest creations, is varied 
only in detail on these two recordings, the Brunswick having 
a most suitable accompaniment from the tuba of Bass 
Edwards. A third version, made for Okeh and released in 
England on Parlophone, has Jabbo Smith replacing Bubber 
Miley, and although it contains some very good solo work 
it lacks the unity of the other recordings; perhaps Smith's 
solos lack the astringency to offset Hardwicke's sugary 
reading of the second theme. 

Creole Love Call is somewhat different from either of the 
two works so far discussed. It is a variant of King Oliver's 
Camp Meeting Blues., which Ellington presumably learned 
from Ms clarinettist, Rudy Jackson, who played with 
Oliver before joining him; the number had therefore no 
direct association with Miley. The arrangement recorded 
at the same session as the Victor H.M.V. Black and Tan 
Fantasy made use of the voice of Adelaide Hall in an 'in 
strumental 9 way. The opening theme is stated by her strange 
wordless singing set against three clarinets, Ellington's fine 
selection of tone colours here being typical. In sharp con 
trast Miley's muted trumpet takes the next chorus in a 
beautifully constructed solo, remarkable in its absolute 
perfection, which is followed by Rudy Jackson who plays 
the long melody of the second theme with a suitably violin- 
like tone. The following two choruses consist of simple 
ensemble arrangements with the reed section playing 
against the brass, first on saxophones and then on clarinets ; 
38 



finally Adelaide Hall returns again with a vocal chorus, 
which concludes the work. Little of musical interest occurs 
after the first three choruses, but these are so perfect, both 
in themselves and in their contrast with each other, that 
even today they remain among the classics of recorded jazz. 
Buiber Miley demonstrates how much the creative jazz 
musician can say in twelve bars, in a solo which is a perfect 
miniature of musical architecture and a study in the use of 
inflexion and variation of timbre to extend the emotional 
range and increase the musical tension. 

It can hardly be said that any of Ellington's other re 
cordings from 1927 bear comparison with the three already 
discussed, although Birmingham Breakdown and Washing 
ton Wobble are interesting exhibits in the light they throw 
on the evolution of the big band. The following year saw a 
considerable widening of Ellington's scope as a composer 
and an increase in the solo potential of the orchestra. 
Nanton and Carney were becoming more important figures 
within the band, Barney Bigard and Johnny Hodges 
came in, and Arthur Whetsol brought his distinctive trum 
pet back to the Ellington ensemble. It was Whetsol's 
trumpet which took the theme statement of the pastoral 
Black Beauty, perhaps the first notable Ellington work in 
which Miley does not play solo ; Whetsol even indulges in a 
little growl trumpet on the Brunswick version of this! 
Misty Morning, another successful composition which does 
not make use of Miley's trumpet, provides in its second 
chorus the first example in jazz of a section playing a scored, 
solo -like variant on the theme, an idea considered novel 
enough twenty years later when it was adopted by the 
modernists. One of the most interesting of the fast tempo 
sides of this period is Hot and Bothered, an altered version 
of Tiger Rag, wherein the brilliant scoring for the orchestra 
takes second place to the vivid and colourful use of the 
soloists in the middle section. The most notable title from 
1928 is The Mooche, which shows an increasing subtlety in 
Ellington's use of colour and harmony. The best of the 
three versions of this number is probably the Brunswick 

39 



with its magnificent solo sequence, Johnny Hodges taking 
a very fine chorus, although the Okeh-Parlophone-Colnm- 
bia with Lonnie Johnson on guitar is different m detail and 
perhaps even more evocative in mood. The Victor-H.M.V. 
has Whetsol doing the growl trumpet passages and is rather 
spoilt by Greer's irritating use of temple blocks. The Blues 
with a Feeling was cut at the same session as Misty Morn 
ing, when Wellman Braud appears to have been obsessed 
with the potentialities of the bowed bass in the jazz rhythm 
section. It is one of the band's finest blues creations, with 
superb solo work from Nanton, Hodges (on soprano sax) 
and Miley. Some of Miley's finest playing is found on lesser 
sides from this period, notably Jubilee Stomp (Victor-H.M.V. 
version) and Bandana Babies; the former containing a 
superb trumpet solo with a brilliantly taken break. On 
Yellow Dog Blues, Miley plays the rather unmelodic verse, 
and without straying very far from the theme as written, 
creates a solo of unusual power and individuality. 

Bubber Miley left the band in February, 1929, but before 
this they visited the studios for another two sessions. The 
first of these was for Brunswick, and after a rather poor 
version of Doiri* the Voom Voom, the band recorded a two- 
part Tiger Rag which is largely given over to the soloists. In 
addition to a good Miley solo, Freddy Jenkins and Barney 
Bigard take excellent choruses, Bigard's first solo being one 
of the finest clarinet solos on record. The second session 
produced a much finer version of Doiri* the Voom Voom* 
which is notable for the colourful scoring of the themes and 
a vibrant duet between Harry Carney and Tricky Sam 
Nanton. High Life contains further excellent Jenkins and 
Bigard, both in much the same vein as in Tiger Rag, whilst 
the slow Saturday Night Function has solos by Bigard, who 
was playing superbly at this time, and Nanton, whose blues 
playing very rarely receives its due from the critics. 

The measure of the loss suffered by Ellington when Bub 
ber Miley left the band can be judged from Flaming Youth, 
one of the last sides they recorded together. The perform 
ance is notable for its extreme exuberance (although, the 
40 



number is taken at a medium tempo) and the vigour of the 
first chorus (Miley's) is never quite recaptured by the suc 
ceeding soloists, Hodges and Nanton. The driving, vigorous 
trumpet with its unexpected turns of phrase and savage 
attack sets a mood which the remaining musicians are un 
able to sustain; indeed whenever Miley takes the first 
chorus in one of the band's recorded performances the 
contributions which follow (no matter how excellent in 
themselves) always have a faint air of anti-climax. The 
emotional climate of the compositions which Ellington 
created along with Miley is unique, and apparently con 
veys contradictory moods to different listeners; to some 
they embody a 'tearful silliness' while to others they are 
sinister works comparable with the macabre writings of 
Edgar Allan Poe. 

Miley's own genius has been overshadowed by that of 
Ellington, for in regarding his work retrospectively in the 
light of his influence on Ellington we are perhaps too prone 
to ignore the originality of his playing. Yet he is a jazzman 
of outstanding achievement and it is doubtful whether any 
other soloist in jazz has created so individual a style with 
apparently so little influence from other musicians. The 
Duke Ellington Orchestra has featured other great soloists, 
men who can justly be compared with Bubber Miley in 
achievement, but never again was one single soloist in the 
band to exert such an influence on its style. 

Ill 

When Cootie Williams came in to the Ellington band as 
replacement for Bubber Miley he was not a growl specialist. 
Ellington's superior taste shows itself here in that he hired 
a first-class replacement, rather than a second-class musi 
cian who played in the Miley style, although much of the 
book was made Tip of scores demanding a Miley-style growl 
trumpet soloist. Cootie's open playing was an immediate 
asset to the band's solo strength, the trumpet section already 
including the exuberant Freddy Jenkins, whose solo in High 

41 



Life was an oustanding contribution, remarkable for its 
range and phrasing compared with the playing of the 
majority of jazz trumpet players in 1929. The section was 
completed by Arthur Whetsol, hardly a 'hot' musician, but 
a player whose sweet tone and lyrical style had already- 
found a place in Ellington's compositions with his contri 
butions to Black Beauty and Misty Morning. The brass was 
rounded off by the trombone of Joe 'Tricky Sam' Nanton, 
never an outstanding open player, but a fine soloist with 
the plunger or wa-wa mute. The reeds were led by Johnny 
Hodges, whose beautifully constructed solos on alto and 
soprano saxes had at this time an astringent, direct quality 
which was, in later years, to be replaced by a warmer, more 
sensuous approach. Barney Bigard, one of the great clari 
nettists of the New Orleans Creole school, played tenor sax 
in the section, though rarely soloing on this instrument. 
On clarinet his tone is most beautiful and expressive, and 
possesses in the low register a rich, deep sonority which is 
quite unique. Bigard is an exceptionally agile player, able 
to move from the low to the high register within a single 
phrase without the slightest suggestion of incongruity, 
while the fluidity of his counterpoint when playing against 
the full band is equally remarkable. In his ensemble playing 
on many Ellington records Bigard demonstrates the possi 
bilities of the New Orleans clarinet style within a big band, 
and his playing can be said to be the most successful use of 
the clarinet in a big-band context. Harry Carney doubled 
alto and baritone during this period, his work on the latter 
instrument giving the reed section much of its distinctive 
quality. For many years Carney was the only major jazz 
soloist on baritone sax, his rich tone and agile phrasing 
being beyond the scope of Ms contemporaries. His warm, 
good-humoured voice is an integral part of many of Elling 
ton's happiest scores, while in the more sombre pieces 
Carney's dark sonority is invaluable. 

On banjo was Fred Guy (who was shortly to switch to 
guitar) a reliable but not outstanding musician. Another 
New Orleans jazzman, Wellman Braud, was featured on 
42 




Melody Maker 



Duke in a thoughtful mood during the recording of 
Such Sweet Thunder 




Melody Maker 

A recent photograph, of Duke during one of his concert appearances 



bass, a musician whose contribution to the Ellington or 
chestra has often been underrated. He did not, of course, 
possess the melodic style of Jimmy Blanton and his suc 
cessors, hut that yardstick is historically inadmissible when 
considering a bassist of this era. Braud is capable of swing 
ing the whole band single-handed, even on bowed bass, and 
his distinctive off-beat slap gives a pleasantly buoyant 
sound to many Ellington records of the 'thirties. Sonny 
Greer's drumming may lack the drive of other jazz per 
cussionists, but his subtle and colourful use of cymbals and 
other accessories added light and shade to the Ellington 
rhythm section and contributed also to Ellington's range of 
sounds. 

The leader's piano solos on records from this period are 
oddly paradoxical. Sometimes he will contribute unusual, 
rather incongruous choruses, wiuch seem to be searching 
ahead of the band toward styles later to be consolidated in 
his writing, while in other choruses he will be content to 
turn out an average solo in a near-ragtime style. There can 
be little doubt that his imagination was very much concen 
trated on the band, and the increasing complexity of his 
scores can be seen by comparing The Mooche from late 1928 
with any of the recordings from the early part of the year. 
From this year onwards the deployment of his forces be 
comes increasingly orchestral, the contrasts of tone colour 
become more subtle, the harmony takes on more and more 
what Strayhorn has called 'the Ellington effect'. 

Amongst the best records from the period immediately 
after Miley's departure are Paducah, an arrangement of a 
Don Redman number, and Cotton Club Stomp. Hot Feet, a 
popular show tune, receives a really colourful arrangement 
with a chase chorus by Cootie Williams' scat singing and the 
growl trumpet of Freddy Jenkins. The latter played the 
growl solos for a time after Miley left, and he can be heard 
in this role in Harlemania and Jungle Nights in Harlem. 
Cootie was featured on open trumpet on many numbers, 
including a striking contribution to the mournfully lyrical 
contingent record of Saratoga Swing and a vigorous solo 

43 



on the driving Double Check Stomp (E.M.V. version). Similar 
in mood to Saratoga Swing but less successful in its ensemble 
choruses is Sloppy Joe, with wordless vocal by Greer; the 
solo sequence however is notable for one of Bigard's best- 
recorded solos, preceded by a dreamy, introspective piano 
chorus by Ellington. A second version of Saturday Night 
Function, released as by "Sonny Greer and his Memphis 
Men', has more superb Bigard, the latter playing his 
famous riff from Harlem Flat Blues to much greater effect 
here than on the 'original'. 

Tricky Sam Nanton's work on these records is outstand 
ing, ranging from the poignant blues solos on both versions 
of Saturday Night Function to the tightly-muted ebullient 
solo on Hot Feet. On the latter the sound seems to be forced 
out of the bell of the trombone in spite of the heavy muting, 
yet the solo rides with a happy buoyancy over the propul 
sive rhythm of Braud's bass. It is unjust to consider Nan- 
ton a mere stylistic shadow of Miley, for the personalities 
of the two musicians are quite different and are perfectly 
reflected in their manner of playing. Nanton is really a much 
more intimate musician than Miley, his work having a 
remarkable directness; a musician who, for all his clever 
manipulation of mutes, never suggested mere gimmickry. 
Although Ellington often used Nanton's wa-wa playing 
with a perfect aptness, this facet of the trombonist's work 
had been unduly stressed, obscuring the fact that much of 
his best work is in such solos as those on Saturday Night 
Function, when the graduations of tone via the manipula 
tion of the mute are slight but telling. The constant altera 
tions of timbre by sldlfully judged growls and slurs give the 
music a remarkable variety despite the melodic limitations 
of Nanton's art. 

Nine months after Cootie Williams joined the band came 
the first of a series of wonderful growl solos, on Ring Dem 
Bells, which also features fine work by Bigard, Hodges, 
Carney and Nanton, and concludes with a sort of jazz stretto 
by the band with Bigard playing against the brass. Cootie's 
growl style is easily recognizable, there being a certain dry- 
44 



ness one might almost say aridity about Ms tone and 
attack, -which sounds far less natural than does Miley's 
muted playing. The melodic line becomes more concen 
trated than is the case in Williams' open playing and there 
is a pronounced tendency to attack certain notes repeatedly, 
as if shaking the very essence out of a phrase. Indeed the 
tightness of Cootie's muted work contrasts strangely with 
his loose open playing, for when the long lyrical phrases 
associated with Ms open style put in an occasional appear 
ance, they are delivered with a deep sombre tone, and a 
pronounced growl. The ascending phrase half-way through 
Ms second chorus on Ring Dem Bells is a good example of 
tMs. 

The most popular, and indeed perhaps the most signi 
ficant, of Ellington's records of 1930 was a slow blues 
scored for trumpet, trombone, clarinet and rhythm which 
was called at first Dreamy Blues, but later re-named Mood 
Indigo. The two brass instruments are tightly muted and 
the whole performance is quiet and dreamy in mood, soft 
and delicate in colour, WhetsoFs lead setting the tone of 
the theme statement. Bigard's rich low- register clarinet 
plays a second theme in a loose, relaxed manner, followed 
by Whetsol's sweet-toned trumpet for a farther chorus; 
four bars of unaccompanied piano and a recapitulation of 
the first chorus and the record is over, but for all its sim 
plicity Mood Indigo remains one of the Mghlights of jazz 
composition. A mood is created and its essence distilled 
within the brief space of a three-minute record, with only 
three wind instruments accompanied by a rhythm section; 
yet within the limitations thus imposed Ellington achieves 
an undoubted masterpiece. The Brunswick version of Mood 
Indigo is the best, with the Okeh-Parlophone a close second: 
the H.M.V. recorded two months later with the full band 
fails to capture the intimate mood of these two versions, and 
seems less perfect formally owing to an ensemble variant 
being played before Bigard's solo, which here lacks the slight 
shift of emphasis wMch made it so important a part of the 
original structure. The number has been recorded several 

45 



times in later years by the band (an L.P. version from 1950 
runs for fifteen minutes) but on none of these is there any 
attempt to capture the perfection in miniature of the ori 
ginal recording. Equally perfect in its balanced form, 
although totally different in mood, Is Rockin' in Rhythm, a 
number which Ellington used to accompany dancers at 
the Cotton Club. The sequence of the themes, the quasi- 
oriental section featuring Bigard's clarinet and the gruff 
trombone solo of Tricky Sam are masterly, with a truly 
classical balance of both instrumental colour and thematic 
material. Three versions of this piece were recorded within 
three months the Okeh-Parlophone of November 8th, 
1930, the Brunswick of January 14th, 1931 and the Victor- 
H.M.V. of two days later. These three versions are worthy 
of study, for they show the amount of variation worked out 
by the band on the original framework. The clarinet solo 
is a set piece hardly varied through the three versions, but 
the trombone solo, although similar in mood and melodic 
construction, gives us a remarkable lesson of what is essen 
tial in Nanton's art as we run through the three recordings. 
Some slight variation of timbre or rhythmic accent gives 
each solo a freshness which is remarkable when we con 
sider the supposedly limited means the trombonist em 
ploys. The fact is that it was by such subtle Vocalization* 
of the melodic line that jazz was able to evolve from the 
folk-song of the American Negro as a fully-developed form 
of musical expression. In this respect the art of Tricky Sana 
is far more rewarding and instructive than that of many 
so-called 'traditional' musicians, that is if we study such 
choruses as these rather than 'atmospheric* wa-wa solos as 
in Chloe or in the Work Song from Black, Brown and Beige. 
In the ensemble parts of Rockin' in Rhythm too we find 
variations not only of tempo or phrasing but of the actual 
material. In the first two versions there is an open solo by 
Cootie Williams which is replaced on the third by a riff 
section for muted brass and the saxophone section. There 
are of course several Ellington numbers which were re 
corded two or three times during this period and all are 
46 



worth noting for the instructional value of the creative 
approach of the orchestra to the material. Happily, RocMn" 
in Rhythm has been issued in all three versions in this 
country and the quality is even throughout. 

Duke Ellington's music was becoming increasingly com 
plex in texture and harmony, increasingly resourceful in 
style, its creator achieving a greater mastery over Ms 
material. It was almost inevitable that he would sooner or 
later break out of the limitations of the three-minute dance 
record and expand the form of Ms music as well as its har 
monic content. The first Ellington composition of this type 
was Creole Rhapsody^ a short enough work by today's 
standards in its six-minute running time, but revolutionary 
in 1931. The work differs only slightly from many of Elling 
ton's better short pieces of the period, these differences 
being in a somewhat freer use of the ensemble as a source of 
thematic variation and in the more complex formal pattern. 
Much use is made of the soloists and this is remarkably 
successful considering the nature of the piece, the only 
blemish being Freddy Jerkins' disastrous rallentando just 
before the final in-tempo section. Creole Rhapsody 1 is the 
first piece of American Negro music which adopted the atti 
tude of European art-music as a non-functional, non- 
popular creation intended for attentive listening. Obviously 
enough there had been, prior to this date, much jazz of very 
considerable artistic value, but it had been conceived as 
dance music in the main, and marketed as a popular com 
modity. The musical success of Creole Rhapsody is therefore 
more remarkable when we consider its pioneering nature. 
Hardly amongst the finest of Ellington's music, it remains 
still a stimulating record to hear and a piece giving con 
siderable insight into Ellington's musical character. 

Two further important Ellington records were made in 
1931, The Mystery Song with its pianissimo theme state 
ment by muted brass, and the magnificent blues, Echoes of 
the Jungle. If some deliberate alliance with the so-called 

1 The Brunswick- Vogue Coral version of this work, which is the one dis 
cussed here, is vastly superior to the later H.M.V. 

47 



jungle atmosphere of the Cotton Club Shows can be de 
tected in Jungle Nights in Harlem, recorded the preceding 
year, in the case of Echoes of the Jungle it seems certain 
that the title was bestowed on the work after its com 
pletion, for it is a blues typical of the Ellington band's 
work in this form. Sidney Finkelstein has pointed out that 
the folk-song character of many of Ellington's blues is of a 
sweeter type than those of the Mississippi blues singers or 
the Louisiana jazzmen, suggesting that they have their 
origin in the mountain ballads which have been the source 
of other jazz standards such as Careless Love Blues or How 
Long Blues. Like the latter, Echoes of the Jungle is based on 
an eight-bar theme which is stated by the muted brass at 
the outset, with an obbligato by Johnny Hodges. Finkel 
stein 1 also points out how Ellington has preserved the fc anti- 
phonal, two-voiced character of the blues'; a typical ex 
ample of the unique way he has adapted this traditional 
material is in his use of Hodges on this record, the alto 
adding a sinuous obbligato to complement the music at 
various points throughout the performance. The major 
soloist here is Cootie Williams who plays a long solo of 
thirty-two bars, the first half open, the second muted and in 
his growl style. The contrast between the singing, lyrical 
open style and the fierce savagery of his growl manner is 
very apparent here. After a brief bridge passage by Hodges 
we arrive at one of those peculiar passages in Ellington's 
music which seem to be derived less from jazz than from 
the lower reaches of programme music. The passage in 
question is a repeated phrase on low-registered clarinet with 
'ghostly' tremolo effects from Guy's banjo, sounding for all 
the world like the incidental music to some third-rate horror 
film of the period. The remarkable thing about the passage, 
which incidentally Duke had used in Blues of the Vagabond 
two years before, is that it fits perfectly within the context 
and becomes an integral part of the piece. This section is 
followed by a wa-wa riff on the trumpets (from Harlem 

1 See Sidney Finkelstein, Jaxx: A People's Aftwic, Chapter 6 (Gtadel Press, 
New York, 1948). 

48 



Flat Blues) and a brief solo by Canton, with Hodges cement 
ing the parts together. The final chorus has the brass again 
singing the melody, this time against an obbligat from the 
clarinet choir. Tic Bellerby has rightly said that this is one 
of the finest big-band blues in jazz ; indeed it ranks with the 
finest blues creations in any medium, one of the very best 
of all Ellington's recordings. 

The year 1932 saw yet another Ellington masterpiece, the 
superb Lazy Rhapsody or Svcannee River Rhapsody, a fragile, 
soft -toned piece, played with beautiful delicacy by the 
orchestra, the pastel tones of the muted brass blending with 
Bigard's clarinet and Brand's softly slapped bass. It seemed 
inevitable in the 'twenties and 'thirties that when the Elling 
ton orchestra recorded for Victor it should have a less subtle, 
more extrovert character than in its Brunswick recordings ; 
two popular 'standards' from this year illustrate this well 
Rose Room for Brunswick by a band obviously the same as 
that on Lazy Rhapsody and featuring Bigard in similar vein, 
and the clamorous Bugle Call Rag which w^as made in the 
Victor studios. A study in shifting accents and varied 
rhythms, this latter arrangement looks forward some years 
to the so-called 'swing' era; the word 'swing' featured in its 
true meaning as a verb in one of the band's biggest popular 
successes, It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing, 
with a period vocal by Ivie Anderson and excellent solo 
work from Joe Nanton and Johnny Hodges. The year 1932 
saw the first of the many re-recordings Ellington has made 
through the years of numbers from an earlier period, the 
custom being inaugurated by Creole Love Call in a four- 
minute 'concert arrangement'. This is a superb version of 
the tune with fine solo work from Cootie Williams and Barney 
Bigard, the heavy arrangement giving a totally different 
view of the work than the lightly scored 1927 version. 

The addition of Lawrence Brown in 1932 had not only 
given Ellington a new (and controversial) solo voice but 
had also raised his trombone section to three pieces. In the 
Slippery Horn of February, 1933, we find In'm exploiting 
the possibilities of the trombone trio in a slowed-down 

49 



variant of Tiger Rag. The whole brass section is featured in 
the beautifully melodic Drop Me Off at Harlem, the con 
stantly changing patterns of brass writing, adding colour 
to the repetition of the distinctive melody. Bundle of Blues 
recorded a few months later, just before the European tour 
of that year, is a further contribution in the band's constant 
output of blues recordings, this time with solos by Cootie, 
Lawrence Brown, Bigard and Hodges. The best of the four 
sides the band cut in London is Harlem Speaks, but a finer 
version of this was made in August when the band had re 
turned to America. On the debit side it must be said that 
parts of this number are ruined by clumsy playing from 
Brown, a musician whose occasional slips of intonation and 
errors of taste stand out oddly from his general air of ele 
gance. The other solos on Harlem Speaks are excellent, 
Williams and Hodges being outstanding. Two further ex 
amples of Ellington arrangements of other people's material 
stand out in this year's output : Dear Old Southland and In 
the Shade of the Old Apple Tree, the latter a delightfully 
whimsical version featuring a humorous obbligato by Freddy 
Jenkins to the theme statement, in addition to excellent 
solos by Nanton and Hodges. Critics had for some years 
been making comparisons between Ellington's harmony 
and that of such European impressionists as Debussy, 
Ravel and Delius; it is said that when Ellington was first 
told of his similarity to Delius he had never heard a bar 
of that composer's music. There can be little doubt how 
ever that by 1933 he was well acquainted with European 
concert music and was adding to his harmonic palette 
techniques from this music. One of the most successful of his 
1933 recordings is a work which shows such influence clearly, 
although it must be stressed that there is no question of 
outright imitation, the techniques being thoroughly adapted 
to Ellington's own musical language. The number in ques 
tion is the oddly titled Rude Interlude (so named, it is said, 
from Mrs. Constant Lambert's renaming of Mood Indigo 
as Rude Indigo) which opens with the hints of melody being 
almost lost in a thick curtain of nebulous harmony, accom- 
50 



panied by irregular piano punctuations. Brief contributions 
by Cootie's angry growl trumpet and Louis Bacon's word 
less voice add to the oppressive mood, which is only slightly 
lightened in the more melodic final chorus scored for the 
brass and reeds. Another sort of impressionism is found in 
Daybreak Express, a successor to the previous year's Light- 
nin j , a composition which had also expressed Duke's love of 
trains, and the escape they symbolize to the travelling 
bandleader. 

The year 1934 saw the recording of Solitude, one of Ell 
ington's popular songs, but more important than this is the 
magnificent Saddest Tale., a piece of masterly tone painting 
with a brief lyric chanted by Duke after the striking intro 
duction. In a more vigorous mood is Stompy Jones, one of 
the band's most driving performances, while the blues re 
ceive a lighter though still colourful variant in Blue Feeling. 
Both these numbers have superb open trumpet solos by 
Cootie Williams, and indeed his playing on an otherwise 
mediocre side, Troubled Waters, lifts this movie tune to 
considerable heights. The versatility of Ellington's art can 
be judged from his work around this time. From such high- 
class popular tunes as Sophisticated Lady or Solitude he 
would turn to tone painting of a mood of utter despair, as 
in Saddest Tale; from the blues of Blue Feeling or the unin 
hibited joy of Stompy Jones to the delicate pastoral tones of 
Delta Serenade, with a theme statement by the soft voices of 
Bigard's clarinet and Whetsol's trumpet. 

IV 

The band was strengthened in 1935 by the addition of 
Rex Stewart, already a veteran of many of the finest jazz 
orchestras of the preceding years ; he had in fact sat in the 
same section as Cootie Williams in the Fletcher Henderson 
band at a time when Bubber Miley was still with Duke. A 
versatile musician, his playing runs from a fierce, biting 
manner to a lyrical style, passing through a comprehensive 
mastery of muted techniques and the expression of his 

51 



highly individual sense of humour. As has already been 
noted, the trombones were augmented to three by the addi 
tion of Lawrence Brown, who joined veteran Tricky Sam 
Nanton and the Puerto BIcan valve-trombonist Juan TizoL 
The reeds had been increased to four with the return during 
1932 of Otto Hardwicke, who like Tizol is rarely to be heard 
in solo. The rhythm section still consisted of Ellington, Guy, 
Braud and Greer, although Braud was replaced by Billy 
Taylor during the course of the year, and for some time 
during the years 1935 to 1938 Ellington was to experiment 
with the use of two string basses. Rex soon made his 
presence felt in the band with characteristic passages in 
Margie and Show Boat Shuffle, the latter being another suc 
cessful piece of tone painting. The most arresting Ellington 
creation of this period was, however, Reminiscing in Tempo., 
a new concert work running for some fifteen minutes. 

Whether jazz loses its identity whenever it is deliberately 
written for the concert stage is an argument which has 
fascinated jazz lovers for years, and there is certainly 
something to be said for the view which regards with great 
suspicion each new move toward European musical ortho 
doxy. The difference between the concert music evolved 
by modem jazz musicians in the past decade or so and 
Duke's extended works is that, whereas the former have 
almost invariably lost the character of the jazz idiom in the 
process, Ellington has always retained the warm, flexible 
manner of jazz phrasing in his writing. Such Sweet Thunder 
is a long way from the blues of a Big Bill Broonzy or a Bessie 
Smith, but without the tradition they have come to sym 
bolize it could not exist; it has the same roots and speaks 
the same language. In some ways Reminiscing in Tempo is 
Ellington's nearest approach to European music, yet it re 
mains a work very obviously the creation of the writer of 
Lazy Rhapsody or Drop Me Off at Harlem. The principal 
theme of the work is announced by the trumpet of Arthur 
Whetsol, after he and Duke have provided a brief introduc 
tion. The theme is announced over an arpeggio figure on the 
saxes, and most of the material is worked from this theme 
52 



and its accompaniment. The most interesting part of the 
work is on the third side, where the clarinets are used in the 
harsh, brittle manner of such twentieth-century composers 
as Stravinsky or Milhaud, ratter than in the warm, lyrical 
manner more often associated with Ellington. The bleak, 
swirling, restless despair of this side is to some extent re 
solved by the conclusion of the work, which fortunately 
foregoes any 'triumphant* rhetorical ending and returns to 
the rather passive mood of the opening. The form of the 
work is loose, in a 'reminiscing' vein as the title indicates, 
but freedom from the restrictions of the usual simple song 
forms of jazz composition was obviously welcome to Duke. 
Although it is not one of Ms greatest creations from an 
aesthetic standpoint, Reminiscing in Tempo remains one of 
Ellington's most interesting and revealing creations. 

The following year, 1936 5 saw the first of Ellington's 4 con- 
certos' which do not, as the title may suggest to the un 
wary, attempt any fusion of jazz with the European con 
certo forms, but are rather compositions designed to present 
one of the band's major soloists in a featured role. The or 
chestra does not contend with the soloist or indeed take a 
major role as is the case in the European form, but rather 
provides an important background for what are above all 
portrayals of the musical character of the musicians for 
whom Duke designed the works. The first two of these 
were originally titled Cooties Concerto and Barney's Con 
certo, but later re-named Echoes of Harlem and Clarinet 
Lament. The former has a hushed, brooding quality as 
Cootie plays muted over a jerky rhythm on piano and bass, 
and the later section, when he plays open trumpet, is in a 
similar mood, with a remarkably dark tone from the lower 
register of the solo trumpet. Clarinet Lament is more of a 
virtuoso performance, with Bigard playing in every register 
of Ms instrument. Outstanding even on so fine a perform 
ance as tMs, are the breaks perfect examples of how to 
make the most of two bars of music. Shortly afterwards 
Trumpet in Spades (Rex's Concerto) and Yearning for Love 
(Lawrence's Concerto) were recorded, but they are much 

53 



inferior to the first pair, the Stewart contribution being a 
rather dull study in trumpet pyrotechnics, the trombonist's 
piece echoing all too well the sentimental aspect of Brown's 
playing; both are indeed rather dull compositions. More 
acceptable than either was Kissin' My Baby Good Night? a 
non-Ellington popular tune of the time with a characteristic 
vocal by Ivie Anderson and some very good solo work, in 
particular a beautifully relaxed, lyrical contribution from 
Rex Stewart. A particularly noteworthy session was that of 
July 29th, 1936, which produced Exposition Swing., an un 
inhibited stomp ; In a Jam, with a wonderful duet between 
Hodges and Williams in one of Ellington's most exuberant 
records ; and Blackout (also known as Uptown Downbeat)? a 
blues of a rather sinister character, with a sinuous Bigard 
solo, a snarling contribution from the muted trumpet of 
Cootie Williams and Hodges' soloing on soprano sax. 

From late 1936 until March, 1940, the records of the Ell 
ington band were made for companies which did not, at 
the time, have an outlet in this country and English en 
thusiasts were denied knowledge of the band's develop 
ment. In later years a fair number of the sides from this 
period have been released here and it has been possible to 
some extent to put Duke's output during this time in per 
spective. It was in fact a time of transition, in which Ell 
ington continued the line of development first sensed in 
such works as the two concertos and Blackout, a consolidat 
ing of the harmonic advances of the early 'thirties and the 
blending of such elements with the blues tradition. The year 
1937 saw the recording of Diminuendo and Crescendo in 
Blue^ a work covering two sides of a standard 78 r.p.m. 
record which, like the Black and Tan Fantasy of the follow 
ing year, has sometimes been issued on separate discs. The 
situation with these two works on English records is a 
typical example of the sort of bungling which record com 
panies are allowed to get away with in their jazz releases. 
Crescendo in Blue was available for a time in the late- 
1940s on 78, but the original version of Diminuendo has 
never been issued here ! During the same period, Part Two 
54 



of Black and Tan Fantasy was put out with an unrelated 
coupling, while Part One has recently been issued on an 
L.P. which omits the second part ! Diminuendo and Cres 
cendo can be heard in a 1956 version from the Newport Jazz 
Festival, but the second half was recorded during a near- 
riot provoked by a tenor sax solo between the two move 
ments and is thus partly inaudible! From 1938 also came 
the original recording of the most delightful of all Elling 
ton's popular songs, I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart, in a 
superb instrumental rendering which makes the later ver 
sions with vocal choruses seem almost sacrilegious. Rex 
was given a more suitable concerto in this year in the de 
lightful Boy Meets Horn, a whimsical study in freak trumpet 
techniques. Duke paid tribute to Willie 'The Lion' Smith, a 
pianist who influenced him in his early days, in the sprightly, 
bouncing Portrait of the Lion^ which contains delightful 
solos by Hodges and Stewart. At the same March, 1939 
session which produced this side came Something To Live 
For, one of the first fruits of the Ellington-Strayhom part 
nership and a record which is often cited as Ellington's own 
favourite of all his own recordings. Those who are not 
familiar with the rather odd taste exhibited by many lead 
ing jazz musicians should be warned that this is a rather 
dreary pop number sung by Jean Eldridge and, in the 
English pressings at least, so badly recorded that any in 
terest in what goes on behind the commonplace lyrics is 
largely unrewarded. Many interesting sides remain little 
known to the English collector from this period, these in 
cluding a new recording of DoM the Voom Voom and a new 
variant on Bugle Call Rag under the name of The Sergeant 
was Shy. Of the sides available here, and not so far men 
tioned, Tootiri* Through the Roof is perhaps the most in 
teresting, as it contains a masterly duet between Cootie 
Williams and Rex Stewart. 

With the recording of a session by Rex Stewart and his 
Fifty-Second Street Stompers in 1936 a new series of con 
tingent records was inaugurated, and in the following three 
years alone over one hundred sides were cut by small 

55 



groups from the band under the leadership of Stewart, 
Williams, Bigard and Hodges. There is some superb music 
on these contingent records, the musicians enjoying the less 
formal surroundings of a small group, as compared with the 
discipline of the foil band, and some of the finest work of all 
the major Ellington soloists of the period can be found in 
these miniatures of Eliingtonia. Mention must be made of 
The Jeep is Jumpin* by the Hodges group and Barney 
Coin 9 Easy by Bigard's, the latter containing magnificent 
playing by the leader in the lower register of the clarinet. 



In late 1939 Jimmy Blanton joined the band on bass and 
Ben Webster came in on tenor sax on a permanent basis, 
having played with the band on odd recording dates in 
1935 and 1936 (he solos on Truckin* and Exposition Swing 
from these years). Stimulating as these two highly creative 
musicians must have been to Duke, their influence alone 
cannot account for the remarkably high quality of the band's 
output in 1940, a year in which merely good Ellington 
records are rare, the norm being excellent. Ellington's 
approach to his music reached maturity in this year, his 
attitude to jazz composition becoming more settled. The 
experiments of the mid-thirties, which had in some cases 
moved away from the blues in the direction of European 
concert music, now reaped their full reward. The tendency 
towards the gathering-in of his various styles into one cen 
tral manner had become noticeable from about 1936 on 
ward, and in 1940 the blending was complete. To say this is 
not in any way to disparage his earlier work, for as early as 
1930 Ellington had a greater mastery of the jazz orchestra 
than any other musician before or since. But the Ellington 
of Mood Indigo speaks with a different voice from the Elling 
ton of Rockiri* in Rhythm, and the same could be said of 
Sophisticated Lady and Blue Ramble or, to a lesser extent, of 
Reminiscing in Tempo and Blackout. This cannot be said 
of his 1940 works, a year which saw an even greater mastery 
56 



of Ms self-created idiom, a greater synthesis of Ms style. 
Even without Duke Ms 1940 orchestra would be the perfect 
jazz group of its size, the superb ensemble work being allied 
to a matchless combination of great soloists Williams, 
Stewart, Xanton, Brown, Bigard, Hodges, Webster, Carney 
and Blanton. To these impressive ingredients for jazz per 
formance Duke added Ms own unique scores, and it is hardly 
surprising that masterpieces resulted. What is amazing is 
their profusion, for virtually every master cut by the 
orchestra in this year is a perfected gem. 

When Jack the Bear was released in England the reaction 
was one of profound shock Ellington, it was claimed, had 
deserted his own music to front a 'swing' band. This atti 
tude is largely explained by the fact that no recordings by 
the band later than 1936 had been heard by those of the 
jazz public who did not import American records. This hos 
tility, however, has gradually given way to an acceptance, 
realized at once by the more perceptive critics, that here 
indeed Duke had brought the traditions he created in the 
'twenties and 'thirties to a new stage of development. 

It would be impossible in a book of this size to detail 
every highlight of this year, and a rapid survey will have to 
suffice. Jack the Bear (the Harlem character who 4 ain't 
nowhere') is a bouncing medium tempo number with Blan 
ton, Bigard and Nanton outstanding; the harmonic mastery 
of the composer is carried a stage further in the savage 
Ko-Ko, supposedly an excerpt from an unfinished opera; 
Morning Glory features Rex in lyrical vein; Conga Brava 
is a jump number based on the opening Latin- American 
theme played by Tizol; Concerto for Cootie, perhaps the best 
of all such works by Ellington, has wonderful solo work by 
Williams, both in his growl style and his majestic open 
manner; Me and You features Cootie, Ivie Anderson, a duet 
by Hodges and Brown, and some remarkable drumming by 
Greer; Cotton Tail is a powerhouse number featuring Ben 
Webster and brilliant scoring for the sections; Never No 
Lament (later to be popularized as Don*t Get Around Much 
Any More) has fine Hodges and Williams; the tone poem 

57 



Dusk is rich in orchestral colour, and lias a sympathetic 
solo by Rex; Bojangles, a portrait of tap-dancer Bill 'Bo- 
jangles' Robinson, is one of Duke's happiest scores; A 
Portrait of Bert Williams is a sketch of the old Harlem 
comedian, being entrusted in the main to the solo voices of 
Stewart, Bigard and Nanton; Blue Goose is a constantly 
sbiftin^ kaleidoscope of orchestral tone and solo styles; 
Harlem Air Shaft is a fast, busy portrayal of Harlem, 
featuring a solo by Rex Stewart which is surely the most 
vehement on record; Sepia Panorama is noticeable for its 
formal structure and for the fine work of Jimmy Blanton, 
both in solo and in duet with the piano ; In a Mellotone is a 
straightforward swinger, Cootie and Hodges being the 
soloists; Across the Track Blues is a magnificent perform 
ance in the form Duke never forgets, the principal soloist 
being Bigard; the latter again demonstrates his unrivalled 
skill at taking breaks in The Sidewalks of New York, an 
arrangement of a non-Ellington number, which also features 
one of Nanton's best latter-day solos. 

Even on the numbers on which he does not solo Jimmy 
Blanton's bass playing is an outstanding feature note the 
importance of the string-bass work in Concerto for Cootie as 
an instance of this. Ben Webster, the other newcomer, 
shows Ms presence not only in his excellent solos but by the 
improvement of the saxophone section as compared with 
its work in the previous year. Yet the greatness of these 
1940 recordings lies mainly in the brilliance of the scores, 
excellent though the solo and ensemble work is. Every 
passage seems to be perfect in its scoring, in its balance and 
in its formal structure, the solos receiving beautifully apt 
backgrounds while an inexhaustible sequence of melody 
informs each record. This was truly a peak year for Duke 
Ellington. 

VI 

The first side the band cut in 1941 was destined to become 
one of their best-selling records and to replace East St. Louis 
Toodle-oo as their signature tune. This was Billy Strayhorn's 
58 



Take the 6 ^4' Train, a medium-fast jump number featuring 
the excellent trumpet playing of newcomer Ray Nance. 
Three numbers by Duke's son. Mercer Ellington, were also 
recorded at this session: Jumpin 9 Punkins, featuring the 
good-natured voice of Carney's baritone and excellent 
drumming by Greer, the latter fitting perfectly into the 
arrangement; John Hardy's Wife, with further bouncing 
Carney, one of Rex's best growl solos and passages for Ell 
ington's piano and Brown's trombone; Blue Serge is by 
contrast a moody, heavy-textured tone poem, featuring 
Nanton's plaintive trombone half engulfed in brooding 
saxophone harmonies and Webster's tenor seeming to 
struggle against the oppressive, heavy atmosphere. The 
themes of these recordings may be by Mercer Ellington, but 
the scoring bears" the imprint of Duke's unique methods. 
The scores contributed by Strayhorn (After All) and Tizol 
(Bakiff) are comparatively lightweight, but make pleasant 
enough listening. The best of the popular numbers from this 
year are Just A-Settiri* and A-Rockin* with casual tenor 
from Webster, and I Got It Bad and That Ain*t Good, sung 
by I vie Anderson. This last title featured Johnny Hodges 
who for the first time employed the exaggerated glissandi 
and slurs which were to become associated with his playing 
from this period onwards. The concise phrasing of his early 
solos gave way to a sinuous, smoother manner, which has 
been used to good effect on ballads and in Ellington's con 
certos for Hodges. Some commentators have criticized this 
manner as sentimental and vulgar, but this is far from 
being the case, for the tone, though rich and sensuous, 
retains its masculine strength, the phrasing being discip 
lined by a strongly musical mind. On the session after this 
Hodges is featured in a typically airy fast tempo in Jump 
for Joy, the title number of Ellington's musical of 1941, 
which is badly sung by Herb Jeffries. 

Although they had switched to the Victor label in early 
1940, the policy of recording contingents from the band was 
continued during the following two years, although not at 
quite the pace set earlier for Variety and Vocation. These 

59 



contingent sides from 1940 and 1941 are perhaps the best 
of the whole series, those by the Hodges group being of a 
superb quality. The oustanding titles include Squaty RGO 
with magnificent Hodges and a driving beat from Blanton, 
and Things Ain't WTiat They Used To Be, a blues featuring 
incredibly melodic solo work from Hodges and a thoughtful 
contribution from Ray Nance. Some of Rex Stewart's best 
blues playing is to be heard on the small band sides under 
Ms name, notably in Mobile Bay and Poor Bubber, wiiile the 
driving Subtle Slough has Rex's growl trumpet playing 
against low T -pitched riffs by the rest of the group, the whole 
being powered by Blanton's tremendous swing. 

In mid- 1942 the American Federation of Musicians 
banned all its members from the recording studios owing to 
a deadlock between them and the record companies on the 
matter of recording fees. Before this, however, the Elling 
ton band, now without the great Jimmy Blanton, were able 
to record some dozen titles, including Perdido and C-Jam 
Blues, both of which have since become jazz standards. 
Despite the large number of recordings by both Ellington 
groups and other bands in the succeeding years, the original 
version of Perdido, taken at an easy medium tempo, re 
mains the best. Two tone poems were recorded at this time : 
Moon Mist featuring Nance on violin and What Am I Here 
For, with solo contributions from Nanton, Stewart and 
Webster. Probably the best of the band's 1942 records is a 
swinging up-tempo twelve-bar blues, Mainstem, which once 
more proves the strength of this tradition, and contains 
choruses by each of the leading soloists with the exception 
of Carney. 

VI! 

The A.F.M. ban was in operation until December, 1944, 
and apart from air-shots and V-Discs we have no record of 
the band's work during this period. Shortly after the re 
sumption of its recording activities for Victor the band re 
corded a four-movement selection from Black, Brown and 
Beige. The suite opens with Work Song, a movement con- 
60 



tinually whipped into tempo by the menacing drum 
rhythm; Carney and Xanton are featured here. Come Sun 
day is, by contrast, quiet and restful, introduced by Ray 
Nance's violin and featuring a long, melodic solo by Johnny 
Hodges over a hushed background. The third movement is 
The Blues, more a painting of a mood than an exploration 
of the traditional blues form. Joya Sherrill sings the lyrics 
over stop chords and odd wisps of melody from the band, 
who later present a twelve-bar theme which leads back to 
the vocal section, after a coarse-textured solo from Al Sears. 
The last movement consists of three dances, a fiery West 
Indian Dance and a bouncing Emancipation Celebration (the 
last superbly scored and, incidentally, looking back to the 
Dallas Doings of 1933) being contrasted with the placid 
smoothness of the final Sugar Hill Penthouse. The following 
year the band recorded the EUington-Strayliorn Perfume 
Suite, a less important score than Black, Brown and Beige, 
which has to contend with, a disastrous opening vocal from 
Al Hibbler. The four movements portray the character that 
a woman may take on under the influence of various per 
fumes, the most successful being the two middle move 
ments: Balcony Serenade with its excellent saxophone 
scoring, and Dancers in Love, a satirical miniature played 
as a piano solo with only string-bass accompaniment. An 
other concert work from 1945, New World A-Comirf was 
recorded for V-Disc, but is unavailable on commercial 
labels. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn obviously had 
their minds very much on the concert stage at this time, a 
fact which can be seen from the heavily arranged versions 
of older Ellington numbers recorded in 1945. The band was 
carrying no fewer than three girl singers during this year, 
and they can all be heard on It Don*t Mean a Thing and 
Solitude. Al Hibbler is fourth vocalist on the latter, which 
has a Hodges solo accompanied by the three girls singing 
wordless harmonies! The extravagance of these arrange 
ments is seen in In a Sentimental Mood (with Hardwicke's 
last recorded solo with the band) and Caravan, the last being 
the most swinging version of TizoPs famous number. These 

61 



re-makes are capped by a sombre new version of Black and 
Tan Fantasy? with Carney taking the second theme and 
Nanton all the growl work. In 1946 the band made an 
album of standard blues themes arranged by Ellington, in 
cluding good performances of Memphis Blues, Beale Street 
Blues and Royal Garden Blues; but the finest records from 
Ellington's last Victor sessions are Rockabye River and 
Transblucency. The former is a Johnny Hodges feature, 
whilst Transblucency (A Blue Fog That You Can Almost See 
Through), is an adaptation of the Blue Light of 1938 to the 
wordless singing of the concert-trained Kay Davis. 

In the last few months of 1946 the band recorded a num 
ber of sides for the Musicraft Company, which leave a lot to 
be desired, as the recording itself was very badly engineered. 
Of the concert music the outstanding item is Happy Go 
Lucky Local, a portrait of a wheezy old train which had 
formed the fourth movement of Ellington's Deep South 
Suite, another concert work only recorded in its entirety for 
V-Disc. Outstanding among the shorter pieces are two 
superb feature numbers for Johnny Hodges, Magenta Haze 
and Sultry Sunset. Jeff Aldam has dismissed these two 
works as 'expertly contrived schmalz*, and it is for some 
reason fashionable to regard them as unworthy creations. 
In fact they are delightful miniatures, in which the almost 
classical beauty of Hodges' melodic line keeps the music 
well clear of any undue sentimentality. A further 'concerto', 
this time for clarinettist Jimmy Hamilton, is Flippant 
Flurry., where the general air of nonchalance of Ellington's 
composition fits perfectly with the cool, academic style of 
the clarinettist. Concerto for Four Jazz Horns (Taft Jordan, 
Brown, Hamilton and Carney) and Trumpet No End feature 
several soloists playing against the full band, the latter 
having solos by four trumpeters on the chord sequence of 
Blue Skies, concluding with a truly stratospheric contri 
bution from Cat Anderson. The most amusing of Ray 
Nance's vocal numbers, Tulip or Turnip, was recorded at 
this time with Ray also playing distinctive trumpet over a 
superbly scored and swinging band. 
62 



Ellington started recording for Columbia in August, 1947, 
and the change of company certainly meant improved 
recording on this occasion, although the band were called 
upon to turn, out a high percentage of popular material of 
dubious merit. The works of true Eillngtonian character 
which were recorded in this year were of an exceptionally 
high quality. Two numbers with important solos by Tyree 
Glenn on trombone are amongst the best of these*: Sultry- 
Serenade and the blues Hy'a Sue, the latter containing 
one of Johnny Hodges' finest choruses. In Ellington's im 
pressionistic vein we were given Lady of the Lavender Mist 
and On a Turquoise Cloud, the latter featuring Kay Davis, 
while the band demonstrates its power and solo strength in 
Three Cent Stomp, a number with superb scoring for the 
sax section. Unusual in that they both feature Ellington's 
piano as the principal solo voice are The Clothed Woman 
and New York City Blues. Both are in Ellington's impres 
sionist manner and are somewhat removed from the jazz 
idiom, the second piece being a study in nostalgia rather 
than a blues in the jazz sense of the term. 

The Liberian Suite was recorded complete for Columbia 
just before the premiere at Carnegie HaU, but this is one of 
Ellington's most uneven works. The opening movement is 
entitled / Like the Sunrise, and features a vocal by Al 
Kibbler which starts the work off very badly, despite the 
melodic excellence of the theme. The remainder of the suite 
is divided into five dances, and although there is much 
music of a high quality the work has little unity and is very 
uneven in quality. Some of the weakest pages are those to 
wards the end of the final Dance No. 5 when Tyree Glenn 
plays some very mediocre passages in a poor imitation of 
the Tricky Sam Nanton manner. It would appear that it is 
the scoring which is at fault as Glenn plays well enough in 
the wa-wa style on other records. The best of the dances is 
probably the first, which shows that a musician of Elling 
ton's calibre can write excellent music round a tenor solo, 
by Al Sears, which at times descends into the vulgarity of 
the rhythm-and-blues style. 

63 



Another recording ban kept the band out of the studios 
for the whole of 1948, and the state of the big-band business 
probably accounts for the poor material which makes up 
much of the output for 1949. This year did, however, include 
an outstanding version of Creole Love Call, featuring Kay 
Davis, which has never been issued in England. In Decem 
ber of 1950 the band recorded four extended scores for 
Columbia, with which the latter were to inaugurate the 
jazz section of their L.P. catalogue. One of the pieces re 
corded was a concert work of some twelve minutes' dura 
tion, entitled The Tattooed Bride. This work describes the 
honeymoon of an athletic character who spends the first 
three days playing such strenuous games that by evening 
he is utterly exhausted and falls asleep at once. On the 
fourth night he makes the rather alarming discovery that 
his bride is tattooed, a fact signalled by the long-held 
clarinet note during the slow section. The construction of 
this composition is as ingenious as its programme, the 
material being worked from the simple theme presented in 
the opening piano solo. The principal soloist is Jimmy 
Hamilton, and in a sense the work is a concerto for him, but 
the most arresting feature of the performance is the playing 
of the trumpet section, which is in magnificent form. The 
other three numbers on this L.P. are extended versions of 
Ellington's standards, the finest being a fifteen-minute 
Mood Indigo with a magnificent Johnny Hodges solo and 
a passage for the band in 3/4 time, while Harold Baker 
contributes a gem of a solo to Sophisticated Lady, another 
superb arrangement. The difference between the popular 
songs of other composers and those by Duke is noticeable 
when we consider the amount of music Ellington has made 
over the years from such numbers as Sophisticated Lady. 
The arrangements on this L.P. have been criticized as being 
too episodic, which is true enough; why certain critics ob 
ject to this is difficult to understand, for Duke gets more 
into an 'episode' than most jazz arrangers can manage in 
several compositions! 

The first records by the band in which Smith, Tizol and 
64 



Bellson replaced Hodges, Brown and Greer are a mixed bag. 
The finest are Fancy Dan, a -whimsical piece built around 
the soloists (this despite the loss of two of Duke's principal 
solo voices) and F.I.P.'s Boogie, featuring Carney and 
Hamilton. Jam with Sam is an exciting jump number \\hich 
gets rather out of hand towards the end, while Monologue 
features Duke narrating the slight, whimsical story of 
Pretty and the Wolf over a background of three clarinets. 
The weakest of all is the Louis Bellson arrangement, The 
Hawk Talks i which had the band running through a power 
house number of a type more usually associated with 
Woody Herman's band than Duke's. Whatever his limi 
tations as an arranger, however, Bellson was an inspiration 
to the band in this difficult period with his excellent drum 
ming ; Ms work sparks several of the contingent sides made 
around this period, including one of Cat Anderson's Latin- 
American scores She, and Cat Walk, a blues featuring An 
derson in one of his rare growl solos. 

Despite the changes in personnel the band recorded A 
Tone Parallel to Harlem in the December of 1951, a seven- 
teen-minute piece which, is perhaps Ellington's master 
piece so far as concert music is concerned. Without any 
break in continuity or any suggestion of the stringing to 
gether of brief episodes, the mastery of Ellington's grasp in 
this work gives the lie to those who consider him to be a 
mere miniaturist. There are, of course, episodes of a con 
trasting nature, but the thematic unity of Harlem is such 
that the impression is one of economy rather than the some 
what lavish spreading out which characterizes such pieces as 
the Liberian Suite. A Tone Parallel to Harlem opens with a 
two -note motive on muted trumpet which forms the germ of 
the first theme of the work, which goes through several vari 
ations, mostly of a dance-like character, before the second 
theme, a 'spiritual' melody, is introduced on solo trombone. 
Notice in the development of this theme the excellence of 
Duke's scoring for the individual voices of Russell Procope's 
clarinet (in contrast to the w r ay he writes for Jimmy Hamil 
ton earlier) and Harold Baker's singing trumpet. The work 

65 



concludes -with a mighty climax built out of the two main 
motives, the tremendous power of the band being harnessed 
in a magnificent surge of sound. 

VIII 

Although the band had a record in the best-selling lists in 
Louis BeHson's extended drum solo, Skin Deep, 1952 was 
one of Ellington's least productive years, only re-makes of 
The Mooche of 1928 and Perdido of 1942 being of the stand 
ard we have come to expect from his recordings. The fol 
lowing year, amid a heavy crash of publicity, Ellington 
signed for Capitol records, declaring himself well pleased 
with their policy. Unfortunately things did not turn out as 
expected, and the band produced during the next few years 
a flood of popular trash which joins much of the Cotton 
Club material recorded in the 'thirties as the low-water 
mark in Ellington's output. Bunny Hop Mambo and 
Twelfth Street Rag Mambo vie with the abominable Blue 
Moon, which features Jimmy Grissom, surely tue poorest 
of all the mediocre male vocalists Ellington has carried 
through the years. Ellington's Satin Doll and Ultra Deluxe 
are, along with Strayhorn's Boo~Dah, among the best of 
the singles by the band from 1953, but more interesting 
than these is the intimate set of piano solos by Duke with 
bass and drums. For the band, hov^ever, the best of the 
records from the Capitol period is the L.P. Ellington '55, a 
selection of numbers from various sessions in late 1953 and 
early 1954. Much of the material is of a non-Ellington origin, 
but three Ducal compositions were re-recorded: Black and 
Tan Fantasy (1927) and Rockin* in Rhythm (1930) being 
new arrangements of old material. The second number 
receives a wild, abandoned performance, the band playing 
with tremendous attack and enthusiasm. The third Elling 
ton piece was a new recording of the 1946 Happy Go Lucky 
Local from the Deep South Suite. In the intervening years 
the old engine has become even more rickety, and protests 
vigorously at the slightly faster ride she makes here. The 
66 



brakes are even more rusty. Cat Anderson's trumpet 
shrieking Its protest as the train draws to a halt. Musical 
portraits of trains are fairly frequent in twentieth century 
music, in such folk-songs as Rock Island Line or jazz num 
bers like Honky Tank Train Blues on the one hand, and 
Honneger's Pacific 231 or Villa Lobos* Little Train of the 
Caipira on the other. But on none of these do we find the 
affection, humour and warmth of this composition of Ell 
ington's, which can justly be said to be the finest of all such 
portrayals. The thin trickle of worthwhile recordings in 
1954 and 1955 caused one of the periodic cries that Elling 
ton was finished, which was shattered to silence with the 
appearance of a magnificent new L.P. for the Bethlehem 
label, Historically Speaking the Duke. This was devoted en 
tirely to Ellington originals and featured a band revitalized 
by the return of Johnny Hodges, and the presence of an 
excellent new rhythm section. East St. Louis Toodle-oo and 
Creole Love Call are the opening tracks, and each of these 
thirty-year-old compositions is given a superb performance. 
Ray Nance is featured on the former playing growi trum 
pet, a role he fills on several numbers in this album. Stompy 
Jones is given over to the soloists, the original score being 
played behind their contributions. The two trumpets take 
the honours here, Nance with a warm, softly phrased chorus 
and Cat Anderson in an exciting high register solo which 
climaxes the piece. Johnny Hodges is heard on Creole Love 
Call, The Jeep is Jumpin* and In a Mellotone, his solo on 
the last-named being outstanding. The solo strength of the 
band is shown in the fact that neither Clark Terry nor Paul 
Gonsalves are given a single-bar solo on the whole L.P. The 
ensemble plays with a great understanding of the rather 
varied series of compositions they are called upon to inter 
pret and indeed the record is above all a triumph for the 
band as a unit and for Ellington himself. A second L.P. 
from, the same February sessions, Duke Ellington Presents, 
is less successful, although I Can't Get Started, My Funny 
Valentine, Day Dream and Blues are excellent tracks with 
good Clark Terry on the last title. 

67 



After these two L.P.s for Bethlehem the band returned 
to Columbia, the first important L.P.s on this label being 
those from the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. The long Dimi 
nuendo and Crescendo in Blue, with the riot-provoking 'in 
terlude* by Paul Gonsalves, is a very exciting performance, 
but the last half is spoilt by the noise of the audience. It is a 
significant item in any Ellington discography, however, for 
the great success of this performance once again pointed 
out to the general public Ellington's pre-eminence in the 
jazz world. It also stressed the importance of other factors 
too long neglected by the currently fashionable modernists, 
for, as Albert McCarthy pointed out in his Jazz Monthly 
review, c lt is a triumph of a great swinging band and the 
twelve -bar blues ... it is also a reminder of what jazz 
was like before the cool boys ripped out its heart.* In addi 
tion to this the Newport recordings include showcases for 
Harry Carney on Sophisticated Lady and Johnny Hodges on 
I Got It Bad, and two more fine blues performances in Blues 
to be There (from the Newport Festival Suite) and Jeep's 
Blues. This last is the finest of the Newport recordings, 
featuring magnificent playing by Johnny Hodges. Johnny 
was the leader in a superb contingent session for Norman 
Granz's Clef label recorded four months after the Newport 
Festival, a series of performances equal to the best of the 
small group sides from the 'thirties and 'forties. This L.P. 
opens with a six-minute Meet Mr. Rabbit, with Hodges 
playing some superb blues choruses, and includes a wonder 
fully relaxed Take the 'A 3 Train and a chamber music 
version of Black and Tan Fantasy. Hodges proves him 
self once more to be the finest alto player in the history 
of jazz, while Clark Terry and Jimmy Hamilton are also at 
their very best. Despite the presence of Strayhorn on piano, 
the Ellington atmosphere of these recordings is a very large 
factor in their complete success. 

The next L.P. by the band is one on which they are 
joined by an assortment of vocalists (including a choir!) 
and extra percussionists, in a performance of the Ellington- 
Strayhora television production, A Drum is a Woman. 
68 



Narrated by Duke, this is a very loose extravaganza on the 
history of jazz, which has met with a good deal of hostility 
from critics who have insisted on taking it very seriously 
indeed. Taken as an intelligent piece of entertainment it is 
quite acceptable, indeed very enjoyable, and it seems 
rather absurd to compare this with the Harlem Suite or 
Such Sweet Thunder. Ellington was quite obviously attempt 
ing something totally different. In between the racy narra 
tion and the vocal numbers there are a number of items on 
which the band play with characteristic excellence, Clark 
Terry being particularly good in the Uej, Buddy Eolden 
section. Commenting on this L.P. in Jazz Monthly Edward 
Towler suggested that if this is a criterion for Ellington's 
work in progress, then, of the many qualities which have 
made him a major figure in twentieth century art, only the 
originality of his music will remain. It was not a criterion 
however, for the next Ellington recording was the Shake 
spearian suite Such Sweet Thunder., which ranks with A 
Tone Parallel to Harlem as his finest concert music. The 
suite is in twelve movements and, with the exception of the 
rather dull Sonnet for Sister Kate and the out of character 
finale Circle of Fourths, all are excellent. Much of the music 
is written in a mildly satirical vein, for example in the jazz 
waltz Lady Mac who had, according to Duke, 4 a little rag 
time in her soul', and in Madness in Great Ones, a sketch of 
Hamlet w r ho was, as Duke says, trying to convince people 
that he was crazy, but c in those days crazy didn't mean 
the same thing it means now'. This movement features Cat 
Anderson playing one of the most remarkable passages in 
all Ellington's music, where Duke uses the extreme high 
register playing of which Anderson is the master to most 
unusual effect. The Romeo and Juliet movement features 
Johnny Hodges, and, like Hamilton's Sonnet for Caesar, is 
in a more serious mood. The wittiest of all these character 
sketches is Up and Down, where Clark Terry is cast as Puck 
and dances happily through a movement which makes 
striking use of Nance's violin in the orchestration. With this 
superb suite Ellington, Strayhorn and the band have once 

69 



more demonstrated their unique abilities, once more shown 
their pre-eminence in the world of jazz. In a television inter 
view when he was in this country someone asked Dmke why, 
at the age of 59, he still travelled around with his band, 
rather than living a quieter life, which he could so easily 
do from his considerable income from royalties on his 
songs and records. He explained that he is, above all, a 
writer, comparing his position with that of the many com 
posers who are lucky to hear one performance in a year of 
their works, while he has his orchestra on hand to play his 
music whenever he wishes. Duke Ellington is, as he re 
marked in an earlier interview, in the band business today 
mainly out of 'artistic interest', and he stresses that 4 we 
stay in it fifty-two weeks a year'. Duke knows that in his 
band he has what is one of the finest musical ensembles in 
the world. If this seems a rather sweeping statement, let 
the reader visualize any other group which could interpret 
a complex score like Such Sweet Thunder and then split into 
smaller units which could create such magnificent music 
as is heard on the 1956 Johnny Hodges contingent L.P. 

The next album after Such Sweet Thunder was one of 
popular standards (only three out of eight titles are Elling 
ton numbers) which, although pleasant enough, does not 
show off the band to its best advantage. The welcome re 
turn of Harold Baker is signalled here by two excellent 
solos, on Mood Indigo and Willow Weep for Me. More in 
teresting is the new version of Black., Brown and Beige, 
despite the total failure of the second side, which has gospel 
singer Mahalia Jackson singing Come Sunday, a most un 
suitable blending of talents, not in any way assisted by 
maudlin lyrics. The first three sections, however, contain 
much of interest, the first two being new scorings of the 
Work Song and Come Sunday movements, the last a rather 
odd blending of the two themes. 

The most recent recordings of the Ellington band avail 
able as this book goes to press are those in the H.M.V. four- 
disc set entitled Ella Fitzgerald sings the Duke Ellington 
Song Book, half of which has accompaniment by the Duke 
70 



Ellington orchestra. The banal lyrics which have been 
tagged on to Ellington's themes by a host of hack lyric 
writers detract, to some extent, from the pleasure the Ell 
ington enthusiast will derive from these L.P.s, and equally 
out of place is the 'baby talk' scat singing indulged in by 
Hiss Fitzgerald on many numbers. No lover of Concerto for 
Cootie is likely to enjoy its popular variant. Do Nothing "til 
You Hear From Me, with, its inane lyrics, while the listener 
is even more infuriated when a superb arrangement of 
Rockiri* in Rhythm is played by the band with Ella scatting 
away in the foreground. The music of Duke Ellington is of a 
quality which can hardly be enhanced by the addition of a 
popular singer, even the best (and Ella is without doubt the 
best), and the L.P.s are interesting only when we are allowed 
to hear the band which plays very well indeed. The most 
rewarding music in these albums is to be found in the non- 
vocal A Portrait of Etta Fitzgerald which, despite Duke's 
verbal introductions, seems to have little connexion with 
its subject, and turns out to be one of Duke's 4 lightw r eight' 
concert works after the pattern of the Newport Festival 
Suite. A four-disc set of Duke Ellington plays the Duke Ell 
ington Song Book would have been a superior proposition 
musically, although perhaps not so great a commercial 
success. 

IX 

Today, as has been the case from 1926 onwards, Duke 
Ellington leads the finest jazz ensemble in the world, a band 
unrivalled in its solo strength and ensemble ability. Despite 
the claims made by lovers of New Orleans jazz on behalf of 
the bands of King Oliver and Jelly- Roll Morton, the finest 
ensemble playing in jazz is to be found on the records of the 
Duke Ellington orchestra. It is beyond dispute that the 
finest big-band scores in jazz are those of Duke Ellington 
and Billy Strayhorn, the extended compositions no less 
than the more generally accepted shorter pieces being works 
of characteristic quality. The Duke Ellington orchestra has 
without doubt created a greater bulk of jazz masterpieces 

71 



than any group in the whole history of the music. These 
achievements are generally recognized, but it is -aot so 
widely appreciated that Duke Ellington is the most truly 
progressive figure in jazz. Other so-called "progressive 9 
musicians have been only too willing to sacrifice the basic 
blues style of the music, in order to utilize the impressive 
harmonic and formal resources of the European tradition. 
Ellington for his part has always remained within the jazz 
idiom in his concert works (with the exception of a few odd 
piano pieces) because his language is always that of the 
blues tradition, his harmonic and formal advances being 
made within this framework. 

If such musicians as Miles Davis or Jimmy Giuffre con 
tinue to be regarded as the avant-garde of jazz, then the 
music will move closer to the European academic tradition, 
and the distinctive qualities of jazz will be lost. Much of the 
music which has followed the bop revolution in jazz has 
been emotionally sterile, many of the so-called progressive 
devices having reduced the music to the level of polite tea- 
dance music, more fitted to the Palm Court than either the 
concert stage or a Negro dance-hall. No art-form remains 
static, and a return to the music of the Harlem or the 
Kansas City of the 1930s is as unlikely as a return to the 
environment and music of New Orleans in the early years 
of this century. Younger jazz musicians will naturally evolve 
a different musical language from that of earlier generations, 
and no critic worthy of the name would object to this 
process. What the critic must point out is that as jazz 
Saddest Tale is more progressive than Boplicity, A Portrait 
of Bert Williams more progressive than Django, and Such 
Sweet Thunder more progressive than Miles Ahead. 

Duke Ellington's pre-eminence in jazz is not only be 
cause of the very high aesthetic standard of his output, not 
simply due to his remarkable abilities as pianist, composer 
and bandleader, but also to the fact that he has extended 
the boundaries of jazz more than any other musician, with 
out abandoning the true essence of the music. 

72 



SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY 



The records listed in the selected discography are intended 
to give the listener a rounded picture of Duke Ellington's 
music. The selection has been made with two objects in 
mind to give a balanced and representative listing and to 
cite only music of outstanding quality. Such a basis is 
bound to reflect the compiler's taste; the author believes 
that the following selection would, although it is a purely 
personal choice, meet with the approval of the majority of 
Ellington specialists. It must be pointed out that the omis 
sion of any title is not intended in any way to be a com 
mentary on its quality; the limitation of space has caused 
many excellent Ellington records to be passed over. 

The matter of current availability has not been consid 
ered in the selection of these records, for, with so many 
re-issues and deletions taking place, it is difficult to be cer 
tain of the position of any one title in this respect. It 
would have been absurd to have omitted virtually the 
whole of the early Victor output, although only a handful 
of sides from this period are at present in the catalogue. In 
view of this, and the fact that re-issues often have different 
backings, there has been no attempt to list 78 backings or 
the full content of any LP cited, for apart from the space 
this would have taken up, it is quite possible that by the 
time this book is published there will have been further 
re-issue&, and the probability is that the titles will bear 
little relation to the coupling of the old 78's, or the con 
tents of previously issued LP's or EP's. 

As the discography is not a complete listing of Ellington's 
recorded output it has been decided to omit matrix num 
bers; for this reason and for reasons of space, only Amer 
ican catalogue numbers are given. Records that are no 
longer in the catalogue are marked with an asterisk. 

73 



Acknowledgment is due to Jazz Directory, Volume 
Three (compiled by Dave Carey and Albert J. McCarthy) 
and the Record Guide in Duke Ellington (edited by Peter 
Gammond), which were the principal sources in the com- 
pilation of this discography. The layout is based on that of 
Jazz Directory, which, in the author's view, is both the most 
logical way of listing jazz records and the one which has 
received the most universal approval. 

Key to Instrumental Abbreviations: ace = accompanied 
by; alt = alto saxophone; bar = baritone saxophone; fej = 
banjo; bs = string bass; bs-sx = bass saxophone; clt = 
clarinet; cnt = cornet; d~ drums; fr-h = French horn; 
g = guitar; p = pianoforte; sop = soprano saxophone; 
tbn = trombone; ten = tenor saxophone; tpt = trumpet; 
tu = tuba; vln = violin; v-tbn = valve trombone. 

NOTES. 

(1) Harry Carney has used the bass clarinet from the 
middle 'thirties onwards, in addition to the more usual 
Bb instrument. 

(2) From aural evidence it would appear unlikely that 
Johnny Hodges played soprano saxophone after 1943. 

(3) Juan Tizol plays valve-trombone on all records on 
which he is present, while John Sanders switched to 
this instrument shortly after joining the band. 

(4) Rex Stewart plays cornet on all records on which he 
appears. 

KEY TO LABEL ABBREVIATIONS 

LP = 33 Vs r.p.m. Long Playing Record 
45 = 45 r.p.m. (standard) record 
78 = 78 r.p.m. (standard) record 



ABBREVIATION 


LABEL 


PREFIX 


TYPE 


Beth 


Bethlehem 


BCP 


LP 


Br 


Brunswick 


BL 


LP 


59 


9 


7000 series 


78 



74 



Cam 
Cap 
Co 



Fkwy 
Mcr* 
Mus 

Ok 

5? 

Vic 



Vrv 
X 



Camden 

Capitol 

Columbia 



Folkways 
Mercer 

Musicraft 

Okeh 

M 

Victor 



Verve 
Label X 



8000 series 

6000 series 

20000 series 

CAL 

T 

CL 

2800 series 

35000 series 

36000 series 

38000 series 

39000 series 

FP 

1000 series 

400 series 

5000 series 

8000 series 

LPM 

LPT 

22000 series 

24000 series 

38000 series 

20- series 

40 series 

47- series 

MGV 

LVA 

LX 



78 

78 

78 i!2") 

LP 

LP 

LP 

78 

78 

78 

78 

78 

LP 

78 

78 

78 

78 

LP 

LP (10") 

78 

78 

78 

78 

78 

45 

LP 

LP (10") 

LP (10") 



Far more extensive re-issue programmes of Ellington's 
records have been undertaken in Europe and many of the 
deleted items are in the catalogue in England and France. 

DUKE ELLINGTON AND His ORCHESTRA: 
Bubber Miley, Louis Metcalfe (tpi) ; Joe 'Tricky Sam' Nan- 
ton (tbn) ; Otto Hardwicke (alt, bs-sx, clt) ; Rudy Jackson 
(clt, ten) ; Harry Carney (bar, alt, clt) ; Duke Ellington 
(p) ; Fred Guy (bj) ; 'Bass' Edwards (tu) ; Sonny Greer (d) . 

New York City, April 7, 1927 
Black and Tan Fantasy 

Br BL-54007 

75 



Wellman Brand (65) replaces Edwards. 

New York City, October 26, 1927 
Creole Lave Call * "X" LVA3037 * 
Black and Tan Fantasy 

Vic LPM-1393 
1 vocal by Adelaide Hall on this track. 

New York City, December 19, 1927 
East St. Louis Toodle-oo 

"X" LVA3034 * 

Arthur Whetsol (tpt) added; Barney Bigard (clt, ten) re 
places Jackson. 

New York City, March 26, 1928 

Black Beauty "X" LVA3037 * 

Jubilee Stomp "X" LVA3037 * 

Johnny Hodges (alt, sop) replaces Hardwicke. 

New York City, June 5, 1928 
Yellow Dog Blues Br BL-58012 * 

Lonnie Johnson (g) added. 

New York City, October 1, 1928 
The Mooche l Co CL-558 

Hot and Bothered l Fkwy FP69 
1 vocal by Baby Cox on this track. 

Johnson out. New York City, October 17, 1928 

The Mooche Br BL-58002 * 

Johnson returns; Freddy Jenkins (tpt) replaces Metcalfe. 

New York City, November 20, 1928 
Blues with a Feeling 

Ok 8662 * 
Misty Mornin Co 35955 * 

Johnson out. New York City, January 16, 1929 

Flaming Youth Vic 38035 * 
Saturday Night Function 

Vic 24674 * 

High Life Vic 38036 * 

Doin 9 the Voom-Voom 

Vic 24121 * 

76 



Arthur Whetsol, Cootie Williams, Freddy Jenkins \tpt] ; 
Joe Nanton (tbnl : Johnny Hodges \alt, sopi ; Barney 
Bigard i clt, teni ; Harry Carney l>ar, alt, clt I : Duke El 
lington lp) ; Fred Guy (>ji ; Wellman Brand (is! ; Sonny 
Greer |di. New York City, March 7, 1929 

Hot Feet 1 Cam CAL-459 

1 vocal by Cootie Williams. 

Cootie Williams (tpt) ; Barney Bigard (clt) ; Johnny 
Hodges (alt) ; same p; bj; bs; d. 

New York City, May 3, 1929 
Saratoga Suing Cam CAL-459 

Arthur Whetsol (tpt) ; Joe Nanton (tbn) ; Barney Bigard 
(clt) ; Johnny Hodges (alt) ; same 6s; d as last. 

New York City, May 28, 1929 
Saturday Night Function 

Co 2833 * 

Note: The above was issued as by "Sonny Greer and Ms MempMs 
Men." 

Personnel as for March 7, 1929 except Juan Tizol (v-tbn) 
added. New York City, April 11, 1930 

Double Check Stomp 

Vic 38129 * 

Charlie Bamet (chimes) added. 

Hollywood, August 20, 1930 
Ring Dem Bells 1 Cam CAL-459 
1 vocal by Cootie Williams. 

Arthur Whetsol (tpt) ; Joe Nanton (tbn) ; Barney Bigard 
(clt) ; same p; bj; bs; d. 

New York City, October 17, 1930 
Mood Indigo Br BL-54007 

Previous full band personnel, but without Charlie Barnet. 

New York City, November 8, 1930 
Rockin 9 in Rhythm 

OK 8869 * 

New York City, January 14, 1931 

77 



Rockin* in Rhythm 

Br BL-54007 

New York City, January 16, 1931 
Rockin 9 in Rhythm 

Cam CAL-328 

New York City, January 20, 1931 
Creole Rhapsody, Parts 1 and 2 

Br BL-54007 

New York City, June 16, 1931 
Echoes of the Jungle 

Vic 22743 * 

Lawrence Brown (tbn) replaces Tizol; Guy doubles on g. 

New York City, February 2, 1932 
Lazy Rhapsody (Swanee River Rhapsody) l 

Co 35834 * 
1 vocal by Cootie Williams. 

New York City, February 11, 1932 
Creole Love Call Br 20105 * 
Rose Room Br 6265 * 

Juan Tizol (v-tbn) ; Otto Hardwicke (alt, bs-sx, clt) added. 

New York City, February 17, 1933 
Drop Me Off at Harlem 

Co 35837 * 

New York City, May 16, 1933 
Bundle of Blues (Dragon s Blues) 
Co 35836 * 

New York City, August 15, 1933 
Harlem Speaks Co 36195 * 
In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree 
Co 36195 * 

Louis Bacon (tpt, vcl) added. 

Chicago, September 26, 1933 
Rude Interlude Vic 24431* 

Tizol out. Chicago, January 9, 1934 

Stompy Jones Vic 20-1533 * 

78 



Chicago. January 10, 1934 
Blue Feeling Vic 24521 * 

Tizol returns; Bacon leaves. 

New York City, September 12. 1934 
Saddest Tale 1 Br 7310* 

1 talking fay Duke Ellington. 

Arthur Whetsol, Cootie Williams (tpt) ; Rex Stewart 
(cnt) ; Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown (tbn) ; Juan Tizol 
(v-tbn) ; Otto Hardwicke (alt, bs-sx, clt) ; Johnny Hodges 
(alt, sop) ; Barney Bigard (clt, ten) ; Harry Carney (bar, 
alt, clt) ; Duke Ellington (p) ; Fred Guy (g) ; Wellman 
Braud (6s); Sonny Greer (d) . 

Chicago, September 12, 1935 
Reminiscing in Tempo, Parts 1-4 
Co CL-663 

Hardwicke and Braud out. 

New York City, February 28, 1936 
Clarinet Lament (Barney's Concerto) 

Br 7650 * 

Echoes of Harlem (Cootie's Concerto) 
Br 7650 * 

Hardwicke returns; Ben Webster (ten) added; Hayes Alvis 
(6s) replaces Braud. 

New York City, July 29, 1936 
In a Jam Br 7734 * 

Blackout (Uptown Downbeat) 
Br 7734 * 

Webster out; Wallace Jones (tpt) ; Freddy Jenkins 
(chimes) replace Whetsol. 

New York City, March 5, 1937 
New East St. Louis Toodle-oo 
Co CL-558 

Tizol and Jenkins out; Harold Baker (tpt) added. 

New York City, January 13, 1938 
Prologue to Black and Tan Fantasy 

Br 8256 * 
New Black and Tan Fantasy 

Co CL-558 

79 



Tizol returns. New York City, March 3, 1938 

I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart 

Co CL-558 

Baker and Alvis out. New York City, March 21, 1939 
Portrait of the Lion 

Br 8365 * 

BARNEY BIGAKD AND His ORCHESTRA: 

Rex Stewart (cnt) ; Juan Tizol (v~tbn) ; Barney Bigard 
(clt) ; Harry Carney (bar) ; Duke Ellington (p) ; Fred Guy 
(g) ; Billy Taylor (6s) ; Sonny Greer (d) . 

New York City, June 12, 1939 
Barney Coin 9 Easy Ok 5378 * 

DUKE ELLINGTON AND His ORCHESTRA: 
Wallace Jones, Cootie Williams (tpt) ; Rex Stewart (cnt) ; 
Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown (tbn) ; Juan Tizol (v-tbn) ; 
Otto Hardwicke (alt, bs-sx, clt) ; Johnny Hodges (alt, sop) ; 
Barney Bigard (clt, ten) ; Ben Webster (ten) ; Harry 
Carney (bar, clt, alt) ; Duke Ellington (p) ; Fred Guy 
(g) ; Jimmy Blanton (6s) ; Sonny Greer (d) . 

Chicago, March 6, 1940 

Jack the Bear Vic LPT-3017 * 

Ko-Ko Vic LPM-1715 

Chicago, March 15, 1940 
Concerto for Cootie 

Vic LPM-1715 

Hollywood, May 4, 1940 
Cotton Tail Vic LPM-1364 

Never No Lament Vic 47-2955 

. , Chicago, May 28, 1940 

Dusk Vic LPM-1092 

Bojangles Vic LPT-3017 * 

A Portrait of Bert Williams 

Vic LPM-1364 

7 ,. cy , TT New York City, July 22, 1940 
Harlem Air Shaft Vic LPM-1715 

80 



New York City, July 24, 1940 
Sepia Panorama Vic LPM-1364 

Chicago, September 5, 1940 
InaMellotone Vic LPM-1364 

Chicago, October 28, 1940 

Across the Track Blues 

Vic LPM-1715 

JOHNNY HODGES AND His ORCHESTRA: 
Cootie Williams (tpt) ; Lawrence Brown (tbn) ; Johnny 
Hodges (alt) ; Harry Carney (bar) ; Duke Ellington (pf; 
Jimmy Blanton (bs) ; Sonny Greer (d) . 

Chicago, November 2, 1940 
Day Dream Vic LPT-3000 * 

REX STEWART AND His ORCHESTRA: 

As for last Hodges group except Rex Stewart (cnt) ; Ben 

Webster (ten) replace Williams and Hodges. 

Chicago, November 2, 1940 
Mobile Bay "X" LX 3001 * 

DUKE ELLINGTON AND His ORCHESTRA: 

As previous full band personnel except Ray Nance (tpt, 
vln) replaces Williams. Chicago, December 28, 1940 

Sidewalks of New York 

Vic 47-2955 * 

Hollywood, February 15, 1941 
John Hardy's Wife Vic LPM-1092 
Blue Serge Vic LPM-1364 

Hollywood, June 26, 1941 
/ Got It Bad and That Ain't Good l 
Vic LPM-1364 
1 vocal by Ivie Anderson. 

REX STEWART AND His ORCHESTRA: 

As for Stewart session of November 2, 1940. 

Hollywood, July 3, 1941 
Subtle Slough "X" LX-3001 * 

81 



JOHNNY HODES AND HlS ORCHESTRA: 

As for Hodges session of November 2, 1940 except Ray 
Nance (tpt\ replaces Williams. Hollywood. July 3, 1941 

Squaty Roo Vic LPT-3000 * 

Things Ain't What They Used to Be 
Vic LPT-3000 * 

DUKE ELLINGTON AND His ORCHESTRA: 

Previous full band personnel except Junior Raglin ( bs) 
replaces Blanton. Chicago, January 21, 1942 

Perdido Vic LPM-1364 

Hollywood, June 26, 1942 
Mainstem Vic LPM-1364 

Shelton Hemphill, Taft Jordan, William 'Cat* Anderson 
(tpt) ; Ray Nance (tpt, vln) ; Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown, 
Claude Jones (tbn) ; Otto Hardwicke (alt, bs~sx f clt) ; 
Johnny Hodges (alt, sop) ; Jimmy Hamilton (clt, ten) ; 
Al Sears (ten) ; Harry Carney (bar, alt, clt) ; Duke Elling 
ton (p) ; Fred Guy (g) ; Junior Raglin (bs) ; Sonny Greer 
or Hillard Brown (d) . 

New York City, December 11, 1944 

BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE SUITE 

Part 1 Work Song Vic LPM 1715 

Part 2 Come Sunday 

Vic LPM 1715 

New York City, December 12, 1944 
Part 3 The Blues Vic LPM-1715 
Part 4 Three Dances 

Vic LPM-1715 
1 vocal by Joya Sherrill. 

Rex Stewart (cnt) added; Greer on d. 

New York City, May 11, 1945 
Caravan Vic LPT1004 * 

Black and Tan Fantasy 

Vic LPT1004 * 

Shelton Hemphill, Francis Williams, Taft Jordan, Harold 
Baker, Cat Anderson (tpt) ; Ray Nance (tpt 9 vln) ; Joe 

82 



Nanton, Claude Jones, Lawrence Brown. Wilbur De Paris 
(tbn) ; Russell Procope (alt, clt) ; Johnny Hodges (alt, 
sop) ; Jimmy Hamilton (clt, ten) ; Al Sears (ten) ; Harry 
Carney (bar, alt, clt) ; Duke Ellington (p) ; Fred Guy (g) ; 
Oscar Pettiford (6s) ; Sonny Greer (d) . 

Hollywood, July 9, 1946 
Rockabye River Vic 40-0134 * 

Anderson and Nanton out. 

New York City. October 23, 1946 
Magenta Haze Mus 483 * 

Anderson returns. New York City, November 25, 1946 

Sultry Sunset Mus 466 * 

Happy-Go-Lucky Local, Parts 1 and 2 

Mus 461 * 

Anderson out. New York City, December 11, 1946 

Tulip or Turnip l Mus 483 * 
1 vocal by Ray Nance. 

Wilbur Bascomb (tpt) ; Tyree Glenn (tbn) replace Jordan 
and De Paris. New York City, August 14, 1947 

Hy'a Sue Co CL-6024 * 

Lady of the Lavender Mist 

Co CL-6024 * 

Baker out. New York City, October 6, 1947 

Sultry Serenade (How Could You Do a Thing Like 
That to Me) 

Co 38363 * 

Harold Baker (tpt) ; Wilbur De Paris (tbn) added. 

New York City, November 10, 1947 
Three Cent Stomp Co CL-6024 * 

Lawrence Brown, Tyree Glenn (tbn) ; Jimmy Hamilton 
(clt) ; Johnny Hodges (alt) ; Al Sears (ten) ; Harry Carney 
(bar, clt) ; Duke Ellington (p) ; Oscar Pettiford, Junior 
Raglin (b$) ; Sonny Greer (d). 

New York City, December 22, 1947 
On a Turquoise Cloud l 

Co CL-6024 * 
1 vocal by Kay Davis. 

83 



laroid Baker, Al Killian (tpt) ; Jimmy Hamilton (clt) ; 
ohnny Hodges (alt\ : Harry Carney '(bar) ; same p; 2 
>s: J." New York City, December 30, 1947 

A'eir York City Blues 

Co CL-6024 * 

5arold Baker, Cat Anderson, Nelson Williams, Andrew 
Fats' Ford (tpt) ; Ray Nance (tpt 9 vln) ; Lawrence Brown, 
^uentin Jackson, Tyree Glenn (tbn) ; Russell Procope 
(alt, clt) ; Johnny Hodges (alt, sop) ; Jimmy Hamilton 
(clt 9 ten) ; Paul Gonsalves (ten) ; Harry Carney (bar, clt) ; 
VIercer Ellington (fr-h) ; Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn 
(p) ; Wendell Marshall (bs) ; Sonny Greer (d) . 

New York City, December 18, 1950 
Mood Indigo 1 Co CL-825 

Sophisticated Lady l 

Co CL-825 
1 vocal by Yvonne Lanauze. 

New York City, December 19, 1950 
The Tattooed Bride 

Co CL-825 
Solitude Co CL-825 

DUKE ELLINGTON AND THE CORONETS : 

William 4 Cat' Anderson (tpt) ; Juan Tizol (v-tbn) ; Willie 
Smith (alt) ; Paul Gonsalves (ten) ; Duke Ellington (p) ; 
Wendell Marshall (6s) ; Louis Bellson (d) . 

New York City, April 17, 1951 

Cat Walk Mcr 1005 * 

She Mcr 1007* 

DUKE ELLINGTON AND His ORCHESTRA: 

As last personnel above plus Harold Baker, Nelson 
Williams, Fats Ford (tpt) ; Ray Nance (tpt, vln) ; Quentin 
Jackson, Britt Woodman (tbn) ; Russell Procope (alt, clt) ; 
Jimmy Hamilton (clt, ten) ; Harry Carney (bar, clt). 

New York City, May 10, 1951 

Fancy Dan Co 39428* 

V J.P.'s Boogie Co 39670 * 



84 



Monologue l Co 39496 * 

1 Ellington (narrator) ace Hamilton, Procope, 
Carney (clt) only. 

Clark Terry, Willie Cook, Dick Vance (tpt) replace Ander 
son, Ford and Nance. New York City, December 7, 1951 
A Tone Parallel to Harlem 

Co CL-848 

Cat Anderson, Clark Terry, Willie Cook (tpt) ; Ray Nance 
(tpt, vln) ; Quentin Jackson, Britt W T oodman (tbn) ; Juan 
Tizol (v-tbn) ; Russell Procope (alt, clt) ; Hilton Jefferson 
(alt) ; Jimmy Hamilton (clt, ten) ; Paul Gonsalves (ten) ; 
Harry Carney (bar, clt) ; Duke Ellington (p) ; Wendell 
Marshall (bs) ; Louis Bellson (d) . 

New York City, July 1, 1952 
TheMooche Co CL-830 

Tizol out; Rick Henderson (alt) ; Dave Black (d) replace 
Jefferson and Bellson. Chicago, December 29, 1953 

Black and Tan Fantasy 

Cap T-521 

George Jean (tbn) added. Chicago, January 17, 1954 

Happy-Go-Lucky Local 

Cap T-521 

Rockin 9 in Rhythm 

Cap T-521 

John Sanders (v-tbn) ; Johnny Hodges (alt) ; Jimmy 
Woode (bs) ; Sam Woodyard (d) replace Jean, Henderson, 
Marshall and Black. Chicago, February 7 and 8, 1956 

East St. Louis Toodle-oo 

Beth BCP-60 

Creole Love Call Beth BCP-60 

Stompy Jones Beth BCP-60 

InaMellotone Beth BCP-60 

Newport, R. I., July 7, 1956 
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue 

Co CL-934 
Jeep 9 s Blues Co CL-934 

85 



New York City, August 7, 1956 
SUCH SWEET THUNDER (Figures in parenthesis indicate 

the order of the movements.) 
Half the Fun (11) Co CL-1033 
Sonnet for Caesar (2) 

Co CL-1033 

JOHNNY HODGES AND THE ELLINGTON ALL STARS: 
Clark Terry (tpt) ; Ray Nance (tpt, vln) ; Quentin Jackson 
(tbn) ; Jimmy Hamilton (clt) ; Johnny Hodges (alt) ; 
Harry Carney (bar) ; Billy Strayhorn (p) ; Jimmy Woode 
( bs) ; Sam Woodyard (d) . New York City, October 1956 

Meet Mr. Rabbit Vrv MGV-8203 

Duke's in Bed Vrv MGV-8203 

Black and Tan Fantasy 

Vrv MGV-8203 

Take the *A 9 Train 

Vrv MGV-8203 

DUKE ELLINGTON AND His ORCHESTRA: 

Previous full band personnel. New York City, April 15, 1957 
SUCH SWEET THUNDER 
Sonnet in Search of a Moor (5) 
Co CL-1033 
Sonnet for Sister Kate (8) 

Co CL-1033 

New York City, April 24, 1957 
Such Sweet Thunder (1) 

Co CL-1033 

Lady Mac (4) Co CL-1033 

Up and Down (7) Co CL-1033 

New York City, May 3, 1957 
Sonnet to Hank Cinq (3) 

Co CL-1033 
The Telecasters (6) 

Co CL-1033 
The Star-Crossed Lovers (9) 

Co CL-1033 



86 



Madness in Great Ones (10) 

Co CL-1033 

Circle of Fourths (12) 

Co CI^i033 



87 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Carey, Dave and McCarthy, Albert J., Jazz Directory, 
Volume Three (E.F.G.), " The Delphic Press, Fording- 
bridge and Cassell & Co. Ltd., London, 1951. 

Finkelstein, Sidney, Jazz: A People's Music, The Citadel 
Press, New York, 1948. See Chapter 6, 'The Experi 
mental Laboratory and the New Jazz'. 

Gammond, Peter (Editor), Duke Ellington: His Life and 
Music, Phoenix House, London, 1958. 

Hentoff, Nat and Shapiro, Nat (Editors), Hear Me Talkin' 
To Ya, Peter Davies, London, 1955. See Chapter 13, 
'Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is his 
band', and other references. 

Hentoff, Nat and Shapiro, Nat (Editors), The Jazz Makers., 
Peter Davies, London, 1958. See Chapter 13, 'Duke 
Ellington' by Leonard Feather. 

Hodier, Andre, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, Seeker and 
Warburg, London, 1956. See Chapter 6, 4 A Masterpiece : 
Concerto for Cootie'. 

Ulanov, Barry, Duke Ellington, Musicians Press, London, 
1947. 



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