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Copenhagen Sep. 30, 1959 corrected
The file with the Copenhagen Sep. 30, 1959 concert made available to DESS members on Jan. 26 turns out to be something totally different. It brings together selections from Ellington’s concert in Paris on Sep.20, 1959 (both first and second concerts) and the second concert in Stockholm on Sep. 26, 1959.
We apologize for having put it on the website and thank Bjarne Busk for bringing the issue to our attention.
However, when the file was published, it was believed to be a genuine recording of the Copenhagen concert.
It was found by the DESS group charged with cataloguing Benny Åslund’s tape collection, which had been donated to DESS.
In the fall of 2011, the group sent the file together with a number of files of Ellington concerts in Sweden to Sjef Hoefsmit, who wrote about them in the 2012-1 issue of the DEMS Bulletin.
Under the headline A lot of Swedish NEW FINDS, he reported what the group had found. Amongst other things Hoefsmit said “A totally unknown (to us) concert is from Copenhagen, 30Sep59, K.B. Hallen”.
He followed this up by publishing a correction sheet (1107) to NDESOR with the “new” information.
So, not surprisingly, the DESS group thought that they had found an unknown recording of the Copenhagen concert.
However, what Hoefsmit forgot when he said “a totally unknown concert to him was that 20 years earlier at the Ellington conference in Los Angeles in 1991, he had said and written that the concert was “a fake” in a review of the 3rd edition of the Willie Timner’s Ellingtonia”. He repeated this in comments on Timner’s 4th edition in the DEMS Newsletter 2001-3.
Hoefsmit built his view on a presentation Erik Wiedemann made at the Ellington conference in Washington D.C. in 1989. Wiedemann had by then published a very detailed paper on Ellington’s visits to Denmark and recordings made of the concerts there. As regards the 1959 concert, he says: “There seems to be no recordings of the concerts.”
The source of the “fake” file is not known to us but it was apparently rather widely circulated among Ellington collectors. Benny Åslund had it, Willie Timner had it and it is also listed in the catalogue for the auction of more than 100 reel-to-reel tapes belonging tho the French Ellington collector André Mahus, which Sjef Hoefsmit (!) organised for his widow.
The Jan. 26 article on the website has been deleted. However, the file in the Goodies Room will stay there for the time being and a list of its contents is here.
Ellington ’88 In Oldham (3)
A highlight of the second day was another nightly concert.
This time it was Bob Wilber and the Ellington ’88 Orchestra that took the stage and they did so to honor Billy Strayhorn.
The Ellington alumnies Bill Berry, Buster Cooper, Jimmy Woode and Sam Woodyard were part of the band on and off during the evening. They appeared particularily in the rendition of the small group band “The Coronets” known from recordings on the Mercer label.
A recurring feature in the conference program was to let the Ellington alumnies share their memories of Ellington and their time with him in different panels.
The first one took place on the second day when the doyen of British jazz critics and the author of important books on jazz in the 1950’s and 1960’s interviewed Bill Berry and Buster Cooper “about their times with the maestro”.
It was followed up later in the day when Herb Jeffries and Sjef Hoefsmit sat down together to talk about Ellington and the orchestra in the early 1940’s and about “Ellington the man”. Don’t miss the end of this video! It got the conference crowd on its feet.
More from Ellington ’88 will follow! But in between comes Ellington ’18 in Birmingham from which the website also will report.
Ellington ’89 in Washington D.C. (1)
In mid-October last year, the DESS website presented the first Ellington Study Group Conference, which took place in Washington D.C. in May 1983.
Six years later the conference was back in Washington D.C. – this time on the occasion of Ellington’s 90th birthday.
Early next month. we will publish some articles about the conference. We have quite a lot of video tapes with presentations as a basis for this, but we are still looking for photos, personal memories etc, to give a more full picture. Please contact the web editor if you have material to contribute.
However, to give you a taste of the conference, we already publish today some excerpts from the conference proceedings.
Herb Jeffries was one of the invited guest to perform at the conference and tell about his time with Ellington. He got a very special honor.
On two nights of the conference, Doug Richard’s and his Great American Music Ensemble presented Ellington’s music from the 1920’s to the 1950’s.
One of the presenter’s the last day was Sjef Hoefsmit and his lecture on “Ellington’s Trains” should not be missed.
The Ellington Study Group Conferences
Last year, the 24th Duke Ellington Study Group conference took place and this time in New York City. And in May this year, DESUK organized a one day mini-conference using a format similar to the Study Group ones.
The Study Group Conferences have had a tremendously important role in building an international network of Ellington scholars and aficionados and a solid knowledge base of Ellington’s work, life and music.
The network of Ellington clubs and societies has been crucial for the conferences. Without them, they would never have taken place. The first one – “The Duke Ellington Jazz Society (DEJS)” – was founded in Los Angeles, California with Bill Ross as President and Patricia Willard as Vice-President. It not only wanted to bring together Ellington fans locally but also build an international network of Ellington clubs.
Unfortunately, DEJS disappeared in the early 1960s but by that time The New York Chapter had been formed. It started in 1959 and with its large membership, it soon had a leading role among Ellington fans. It change its name to The Duke Ellington Society (TDES) at the request of Duke Ellington himself in the 1960s and later it became TDES only.
In 1993, the Duke Ellington Society of Sweden was formed.
Another key factor behind the conferences was the existence of a network of Ellington experts, who worked together to increase the knowledge about Ellington’s work and life.
Tapes from Study Group conferences
The 24 Duke Ellington Study Group conferences have been documented in photos, sound and video recordings, articles in the DEMS Bulletin, the DESS Bulletin, Blue Light and similar publication etc. Except for the articles, this material is not easily accessible for Ellington aficionados and is often buried in archives or personal collection.
The late Sjef Hoefsmit – the eminent Ellington scholar and editor of the DEMS Bulletin – took part in all Study Group conferences from 1982 to 2008 and in 1986 he started to document the proceedings of the conferences with his video camera. He was also given copies of sound recordings of some conferences. After his passing away in 2012, all the tapes has been hidden away in a box in Hoefsmit’s study and later in the basement of his daughter Babette’s basement.
The box with some 140 tapes was recently donated to the DESS website.
The website will do its outmost to convert them to digital format and make them available through it.
A project group composed of Louis Tavecchio, Joe Medjuk, David Palmquist and the editor of the website has been formed. It will oversee and guide the work. The group is an open one so anyone, who would like to be part of it and contribute to its work is welcome.
A list of the tapes is available here.