Tomorrow, it is 78 years ago since Duke Ellington and his orchestra ended the 1939 tour of Sweden with a concert at the Stockholm Concert Hall. The concert was also part of the celebration of Ellington’s 40th birthday – a celebration that started in the early morning.
During the tour, Ellington made three appearances in Stockholm – on April 16 and 29 at the Stockholm Concert Hall and on April 24 at the Royal Academy of Music.
Someone took a photo during one of the concerts at the Concert Hall – possibly the one on April 16 – and the website is happy to be able to publish it thanks to Jan Bruér.
Another photo giving a full overview of the main hall of the Concert Hall was published in the May 1939 issue of Orkesterjournalen.
The review in Orkesterjournalen of the April 16 concert is available here and in the Ellington Archive/Articles.
Rolf Dahlgren – then a young and aspiring journalist – reviewed the concert for the socialist daily Folkets Dagblad and it was reprinted in the DESS Bulletin in 2012. Also this review is available here and in the Ellington Archive/Articles.
[…] has published two articles about the tour in Sweden with some quite unique photos. One is about Ellington’s concerts in Stockholm on April 16, April 24 and April 29 and the other about the concert in Storvik on April 23, […]
I was curious if you ever considered changing the
page layout of your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content
so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or two images.
Maybe you could space it out better?
Thank you for your comment. What sort of changes in the layout would you like to see_ Shorter texts and more pictures? It is not clear to me. As regards the 1939 tour, there exist very few photos and the ones we have published are very rare and almost all of them have never been published before. Best regards Ulf Lundin.