Such Sweet Thunder

Stony Brook is a small University town situated on the north shore of Long Island, NY. It  is famous for its University and an open air amphi theatre, Dogwood Hollow, which has been the venue of many musical events. On July 18, 1958, the theatre was visited by Duke Ellington and his orchestra who performed in concert. It is claimed that the concert was recorded with only one microphone, through a hole in the stage floor (DEMS). This concert has hitherto been unissued commercially, but we intend to give our members the opportunity to listen to the complete proceedings. Because of the length of the concert, we prefer to divide it in two parts, wherof this is part 1. Above you can see a sketch of Dogwood Hollow and a programme with Ellingron’s autograph.  Duke and his men played there already on July 27, 1957, but also this concert is not issued commercially but possibly there are collectors who have a tape of it.

On this date Oscar Pettiford, who subbed for Jimmy Woode on bass, did his last gig with Ellington. He was regularly with the Ellington band from 1945 to 1948. He died in 1960.

Oscar Pettiford

The first part of the concert is In the Goodies Room,  where DESS-members can listen to and download it. (more…)

Leïla Olivesi is one of the young jazz stars at the Parisian and French firmament but perhaps not known enough outside France except in the international Ellington community.

She is a person with many talents but foremost she is a pianist, a composer and a bandleader. She frequently performs with her different groups at jazz clubs in Paris and jazz festivals in France and most of the time they play her compositions.

She has a Master in musicology and philosophy with a thesis on “The role of the  piano in the Duke Ellington orchestra” and she is currently working on her doctorate.

On top of this, Leïla is a music teacher both in schools and conservatories. She has also taken upon herself to bring jazz to young people. Her Sunday afternoons for children at the Sunset jazz club in Paris are quite fascinating.

Leïla got her breakthrough as a composer in 2013 when she won the first prize for her composition “Summer Wings” in the Big Band “Ellington composers” competition in Paris.

This led her to get a commission to write what was to become Suite Andamane for symphonic orchestra, jazz big band and choir.

Until now, she has recorded five albums, mostly with her own compositions.

Andamane

Utopia

Frida

l’etrange fleur

TIY

Her sixth album – Astral – will be released on 18 November.

But already on 28 October, a single will be available to give a first taste of what is in the full album.

Both the CD and the single can be ordered before release dates at https://bfan.link/astral-6

I talked to Leïla some days ago and here is what she had to say.

The new album is in many ways her most ambitious venture. As the previous album Suite Andamane, it is recorded by an octet/nonet formed by her regular group plus some guest artists.

In his liner notes to Suite Andamane, the late Claude Carrière wrote: “Here Leïla appears, best as ever, as architect of her imaginary world … and her ear incessantly tuned to new trends in the music world”.

I am sure he would have said the same thing about Astral but also noted her compositional development during the three years that has passed since Suite Adamane was released and her more Ellingtonian positioning of the piano in the music.

Astral is a tribute to Carrière, who passed away last year. Leïla was very close to him and she remembers and honours him with  the Missing CC Suite. It has two movements, Portrait and Missing CC.

Here is Missing CC from a summer concert in 2021.

The Missing CC Suite is of course Leïla’s own composition and so are the other songs in the album except Scorpio (track 5), which is the well-known Mary -Lou Williams composition. Astral and Au feu des rêves are co-compositions with drummer (and partner) Donald Kontomamou.

Astral is an appropriate name for the new album because it has a strong interstellar and cosmic dimension. Possibly, Mary-Lou Williams has inspired this with her Zodiac Suite but it might also reflect personal dimensions. In his review of Suite Adamane Claude Carriére talks about Leïla as an “architect of her imaginary world”.

Is it a coincidence that Astral opens with the song Astral followed by Mary Lou?

She also has a strong literary strain. Already in the quintet album Utopia , she demonstrated this and followed it up in Suite Andamane by including two poems – one by herself (Black Widow) and one by her mother (Les Amants) – to which she had put music.

This time, she includes in the new album two poems by the French poet and writer Lucïe Taïeb – Soustraire à la lumière and Au feu des rêves to which she gives musical interpretations. A instrumental version of Black Widow is also included.

Leîla is very knowledgeable about Duke Ellington as demonstrated in her Master thesis and in her many Maison du Duke presentation. However, she seldom includes Ellington compositions in her records. I have only found two – Prelude to a Kiss in TIY and Satin Doll in Suite Andame. That’s a pity because she is well positioned to give new life to Ellington’s music.  Perhaps the international Ellington community could fund a “Olivesi meets Duke” CD?

More about Leïla can be learned from her website http://www.leilaolivesi.com. There one can also listen to many of the compositions in her albums. She is very active in social media.

Nearly 50 years after Ellington’s death, Duke’s music still continues to inspire young musicians. One of them is Laura Jurd. For those of you who haven’t heard about her, she is a British award-winning trumpet player, composer and bandleader. Very active on the UK scene, Laura has developed a reputation as one of the most creative young musician in recent years.

There are many similarities between Ellington’s and Jurd’s music. Just as the blues is always a fundamental element in Ellington’s music, Jurd likewise draws on folk music from her heritage. She doesn’t accept boundaries in music either, and her music reaches far beyond so called jazz music.

If you listen through the 8 albums or so she has made so far, and the many recordings available on YouTube, you will find several pieces related to Ellington. One of them is Billy Strayhorn’s composition Absinthe from 1963. She recorded it for the album To the Earth, released in 2020, with her regular quartet Dinosaur, together with 6 of her own compositions.

This new interpretation of this relatively obscure Strayhorn tune, is done with much respect to the original, but at the same time, the four musicians manages to give it a modern touch. It’s also quite remarkable how well Strayhorn’s tune fits in with Jurd’s own compositions.

Like Absinthe, the next track also originates from the Afro Bossa album. It is Ellington’s own composition Purple Gazelle. Jurd recorded a duo version for YouTube in 2020 with drummer Corrie Dick, also af member of the quartet Dinosaur.

There are many similarities between Jurd’s playing and the style of the Ellington trumpets. When you listen, you will notice a lot of growl and plunger work, witch often reminds me of Ray Nance. She also does valve effects, like squeezing the note and making tremolos and trills using alternative fingering, much like Rex Steward did (think of Frantic Fantasy for example).

Like Duke’s musicians, Laura also likes to invent new sounds on the instrument. On Purple Gazelle you will hear a short section (0:43) where she plays with a buzzing sound. This is done by inserting a kazoo into the bell. I have never heard anyone else do that.

In 2021, she made a solo recording of Absinthe for YouTube. Here you can hear her play some pedal notes. Every trumpet player can do that, but it’s rarely used as anything more than a technical exercise. Here she implies these low notes to good effect, with good sound and intonation, and so did Rex Steward occasionally back in the days (think of the cadenza from Boy meets horn for example.)

The last example is Jurd’s own composition Jump Cut Shuffle, written for the Ligeti String Quartet in 2016, and included on the album Stepping Back, Jumping In, released in 2019. The piece is inspired by Ellington and Strayhorn’s The Queen’s Suite from 1959. Here is a short video by Laura explaining the idea behind the piece.

As Jurd states in the video, it is not an arrangement of The Queen’s Suite. Instead, she has taken small sections from Ellington and Strayhorn’s work and used them as a starting point for her own composition. Although not an arrangement, there are several easily recognizable bits of Ellingtonia in the piece. The most obvious, is probably Paul Gonsalves’ break heard several times during the Northern Lights movement. It is first presented solo in the viola (1:35), and later as a canon between all four strings (5:41). The beginning of Lightning Bugs and Frogs is also clearly heard as a cannon (1:07), played pizzicato by all four string players. There are several others. Try for yourself and see how many you can find.

And if you haven’t had enough Laura Jurd at this point, i recommend listening to her latest album, released this september, entitled The Big Friendly Album.

Recommended albums by Laura Jurd:

Laura Jurd: The Big Friendly Album (Big Friendly Records, 2022)
Dinosaur: To The Earth (Edition Records, 2020)
Laura Jurd: Human Spirit (Chaos Collective, 2014)

Webpage: https://www.laurajurd.com/

Author: Rasmus Henriksen

It is generally presumed that Sidney Bechet played with Duke Ellington in the mid-20s as a member of The Washingtonians. This presumption is based upon what Bechet and Ellington say in their respective autobiographies

In Treat Me Gentle, Bechet says that he linked up with Ellington in mid 1924; “It was a fine thing to playing with Duke Ellington in 1924.” However, in Music Is My Mistress  Ellington says that Sidney Bechet joined his band in 1926.

So was it in mid-1924 or in 1926 that Bechet became a member of The Washingtonians?

It can’t have been in 1926. By that time, Bechet was in Europe with Revue Negre (The Black Revue) and he stayed there until 1930. It is difficult to understand how Ellington made this mistake (or was it Stanley Dance’s error?).

This article will try to find the dates when Bechet played with Ellington as a member of The Washingtonians. The main sources for the article are:

John Chilton’s well researched and detailed biography of Bechet – Sidney Bechet; The Wizard of Jazz. It has some information about what Bechet did in 1924-1925 but for crucial dates, it is rather incomplete.

Guy Demole’s Sidney Bechet – His musical activities from 1907 to 1959. It is a very solid discography and has a lot of good information about his whereabouts.

Ken Steiner’s Wild Throng Dances Madly in Cellar Club. It is the result of an impressive harvesting of contemporary newspapers and journals on Duke Ellington’s whereabouts 1923-1927.

David Palmquist’s invaluable online database The Duke Where and When (TDWAW). It is available at http://tdwaw.ca/. The information in Steiner’s booklet is incorporated in the database together with Palmquist’s own findings and those of others. All references to TDWAW in the article is from TDWAW 1.

Steven Lasker’s also impressive and detailed The Washingtonians, A Miscellany.

Let’s start to look at the information available from these sources for the period May 1924 to May 1925.

By the beginning of 1924, both Ellington and Bechet were firmly established in New York, Ellington as the leader of the house band – The Washingtonians – at Hollywood Cabaret while Bechet primarily worked in (touring) shows, participated in recording sessions and played in bands.

As regards Bechet, at the beginning of 1924 he got involved in the Will Marion Cook / Abbie Mitchell musical Negro Nuances. It was being written at that time and Bechet apparently contributed to it.

Chilton says that the project never got beyond the embryonic stage but the entry on the show in the Musicals in Black and White encyclopedia says that it “apparently went on tour in 1924”.

If there was a tour with the musical, it was most likely a short one, not involving Bechet. According to A Century of Musicals in Black and White, Bechet had signed up with Jimmie Cooper’s Black and White Revue and toured with it in the winter of 1924.

However, Bechet was back in New York at the end of February or early March 1924 and then joined the Noble Sissle-Eubie Blake show In Bamville, which opened in Rochester, New York on 10 March 1924 (Chilton).

It was another short engagement for Bechet and when the show went on a tour that lasted 24 weeks, he remained in New York for short gigs and recording sessions.

Only two recording sessions, materialized. He participated in one circa 16 May 1924 with Clarence Williams and Eva Taylor and one circa 30 May 1924 in which he accompanied the singer Maureen Englin.

Guy Demole is the only one who gives some details about Bechet’s gigs in New York during the spring of 1924. He says that Bechet played clubs around 134th Street in Harlem (Small’s, Leroy’s Fritz’s, Connie’s, Owl’s and others). However, he must also have gigged in clubs in mid-Manhattan. like Hollywood Cabaret and others.

As regards Ellington, in mid-February 1924 he became the leader of The Washingtonians after Elmer Snowden had left the band.  By that time, Hollywood Cabaret was running a new and apparently successful  show called Mississippi Revue but the club had also started to get into trouble for having served whisky and beer.

In the early morning of 4 April 1924, Hollywood Cabaret, burnt down and The Washingtonians was out of work. It then left New York for a tour in New England from about 12 to 26 April (Steiner page 16 and TDWAW 1924-04-03). There is no indication that Bechet was part of the orchestra at that time.

When Hollywood Caberet reopened on 1 May, 1924, it was with a new show by Leonard Harper  called The Virginia Girls (or The Virginian Girl Revue). James P. Johnson wrote the music and also led the band, which included Sidney Bechet and Benny Carter among others (TDWAW 1 1924-05-01).

It did not go well between Johnson and Bechet. Johnson expected the band to play his written arrangements and this was not Bechet’s cup of tea. So he got fired by Johnson. Shortly thereafter, Johnson went the same way.

In Treat Me Gentle, Bechet says “after James P. had got me out then he went and got himself fired. And the band which took his place was Duke and me”.

Possibly, this was what happened but according to TDWAW 1 (1924-05-15), Johnson’s band was replaced by a “French Jazz Orchestra (TDWAW 1924-05-15) but it was also short-lived, and on 10 June The Washingtonians was back at the club (TDWAW 1924-06-10)

It is often presumed that Bechet joined The Washingtonians at this moment but it is contradicted by Chilton, who says that Bechet after having parted his ways with James P. Johnson joined the band at the Rhythm Club in Harlem and become a leader of it after a while. However, Chilton does not give a source for this information so it is impossible to know how accurate it is.

Chilton offers no date as regards when Bechet joined The Washingtonians but he identifies Leo Bernstein – one of the owners of Hollywood Cabaret – as the instigator of Ellington’s recruitment of Bechet, and this points to mid-June as the date.

Another discography information to consider is what Bechet says in Treat Me Gentle: “When I first joined the band, Bubber Miley was in jail over some trouble concerning a girl.”

Unfortunately, it has not been possible to establish when this was the case or how long Miley was in jail.

Was he in jail in June? If so, it must have been only for a few days since Miley did a recording session for the Ajax label in that month (as he also did in May and July).

If it was a longer jail period, then it must have been in the spring and have no connection to Bechet’s linking up with Ellington and The Washingtonians.

In any case, based on what has been found, it seems likely that Bechet joined The Washingtonians sometime between 10 and 15 June 1924.

How long did he stay with the band?

It is not easy to give a clear-cut answer but Chilton and particularly Ken Steiner and David Palmquist give some help. I will use their information (and some other) to trace Bechet’s movements from July 1924 to the spring 1925.

Apparently, Hollywood Cabaret stayed open all the summer of 1924 and “it seems likely that The Washingtonians worked at the Hollywood through the summer” (Steiner page 18). “Another possibility”, Steiner says “is a side trip to New England” for the band and that such a tour could be the summertime tour of New England with Bechet in the band that Ellington writes about in Music Is My Mistress but misdates it to 1926.  However, so far there has been no proof of such a trip.

In my view, a third possibility could be that Hollywood Cabaret was closed in August since Otto Hardwick is reported to have played with the White Brothers’ orchestra in Chicago in August.

Anyhow, on 6 September, a new revue by Leonard Harper – Creole Follies – opened at Hollywood Cabaret and “Washingtonian’s Hollywood Jazz Orchestra” was in place to provide music (Steiner page 18, TDWAW 1 1924-09-06). If Becher was still in the band is impossible to say since no ads with listings of the band members have been found yet.

In the early morning of 16 December 1924, there was another burn-down of Hollywood Cabaret and The Washingtonians went on tour again.

There is some evidence that it played the Fox Theatre circuit in upstate New York for the rest of December and most of January 1925 (TDWAW 1 1924-12-16) but also some more firm information that the orchestra played dances and did concerts in New England from 24 January to 7 February (TDWAW 1 1925-01-26 )

Was Bechet in the band the this tour? It is doubtful since there is no mentioning of Bechet in any of the reviews of the New England tour reprinted in Wild Throng Dances Madly in Cellar Club.

Did he appear when Ellington and The Washingtonians went back to New York circa mid-February for the reopening of Hollywood Cabaret (now called Club Kentucky) on 19 February 1925? He is not mentioned in any of the newspaper articles, reviews and listings which were published after the opening but neither were other members of the band except Ellington.

All this indicates that Bechet was out of The Washingtonians in the late summer or early fall of 1924. In his autobiography, Barney Bigard says that Ellington fired Bechet after he had been absent for three days without any trace. “Where the hell have you been? Ellington asked Bechet according to Bigard. And he answered: “I jumped in a car and we got lost and I just now finally found out where I was.”

Did this happen while the band was on tour or in New York?

One possibility is that he was fired in conjuction with “the side trip to New England” that Ken Steiner talks about in his booklet (see above). In Music Is My Mistress, Ellington says that the New England tour with Bechet was quite unruly in terms of band behaviour and that he had enough of Bechet when the band was back in New York.

Another possibility is that Bechet did not appear when Ellington and the band started to rehearse for the Creole Follies Revue or in conjunction with that.

Whether it was one or the other, there is evidence that Bechet may have been out of The Washingtonians by mid- August. An ad in The Post-Star, Glen Falls, N.Y. 12 August 1924, announces a three day appearance by Sidney Bechet and his orchestra of colored dancers and singers at the Empire Theatre on 14-16 August (Thursday, Friday and Saturday).

As can be seen in the ad, It was not a show like In Bamville or Seven-Eleven but rather a kind of vaudeville with different elements. The role of Bechet with his dancers and singers is not clear, neither is it if this was a one time things or something with which Bechet toured.

A show apperance is of course not in itself proof enough that Bechet was fired in mid-August 1924 but together with the other indications above and the fact that he also resumed his recording activities in October 1924 makes it quite obvious that Bechet’s stay with Ellington and The Washingtonians was only three months.

In his Bechet biography, Chilton says that “Bechet casually resumed his work in late-night clubs after he was fired by Ellington and again secured the job as a leader of the Rhythm Clubs’s resident group. But Chilton complicated matters for us when he start to talk about Bechet’s recording activities. He does not say anything about Bechet’s recording sessions during the last three months of 1924 but starts with the ones in 1925. This might indicate that Chilton considers that Bechet was fired by Ellington in late 1924 but he does not say this directly and does not provide a date or a span of dates for when it happened.

In the spring of 1925 Bechet had joined  or was preparing to join a tour with with the show Seven-Eleven. In his book, Chilton quotes a news piece in the 9 May, 1925 issue of the Baltimore Afro-American: “Bechet, the clarinet wizard, has been added to the musical unit in Seven-Eleven.” The tour was quite long and Bechet stayed with it until early July when it arrived in New York.

There he collected a big payment of royalties for his compositions and decided to open a club at 145th Street called Club Basha. Johnny Hodges joined the band there and “it was then he used to show me different things on the soprano” (Chilton). More about Club Basha can be read in Chilton’s book and also about Bechet’s departure for Europe with La Revue nègre in September 1925.

Postscript

The short stay in The Washingtonians was not the only time Bechet played with Ellington. It also happened in 1932 when Bechet joined the Ellington orchestra for a week (23-29 April). Ellington was to record The Sheik of Araby and when he heard that Bechet was out of work, he decided to invite him to be part of Ellington Orchestra for a week to help Johnny Hodges to recreate the spectacular chorus that Bechet usually played on the song. So he had and Juan Tizol transcribed what Bechet played. It become Hodges solo when Ellington recorded The Sheik of Araby 16 May 1932.

Those who would like to know more about this is recommended to read the article about it in the DEMS Bulletin 2002-2.

Author Ulf Lundin with the support of David Palmquist

DE-SB final 1