Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (Fred Waller, 1935)

Duke Ellington receives a telegram reminding him of his forthcoming concert in two weeks’ time—not a terribly long notice for finishing an extended composition that seemingly hasn’t been touched before, but most probably accurate, since Ellington was one of the greatest procrastinators in jazz, often writing right up until the curtain rose.

London Jazz Festival: Symphonies in Black – Duke Ellington Shorts

Jazz on Screen: Symphonies in Black: Duke Ellington Shorts

Tue 19 Nov 2024, 18:30, Location: Barbican Cinema 3

Introduction to the screening by Ehsan Khoshbakht

Join us at the Barbican for a special screening event featuring 16 captivating short films that highlight the extraordinary musical legacy of Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. Spanning nearly a quarter of a century (1929-1953), these films showcase Ellington’s performances in a variety of settings, often accompanied by dancers and singers, including the legendary Billie Holiday in Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. This particular film fluidly transitions between Ellington composing in solitude, leading his band in a tuxedo at a concert, and artistic depictions of African American life, including a moving sequence with Billie Holiday portraying heartbreak similar to Bessie Smith's iconic film appearance six years prior.

Paris Blues (1961)

Duke Ellington behind the scene of Paris Blues (1961) with Billy Strayhorn (left), director Martin Ritt, Louis Armstrong and production designer Alexandre Trauner.

Symphonies in Black: Duke Ellington Shorts

Black & Tan

Symphonies in Black: Duke Ellington Shorts

A programme by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Ehsan Khoshbakht (Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, June 2024)

Introductory note by Jonathan Rosenbaum

In 16 shorts made over a stretch of almost a quarter of a century (1929-1953), Duke Ellington and his Orchestra perform in a variety of settings, often with dancers and singers – including Billie Holiday in Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. The latter cuts freely between Ellington alone in thoughtful composing mode, Ellington in a tux performing the same extended composition with his band at a concert, arty images of men engaged in heavy labour, a wordless church sermon, a nightclub floorshow, and even a short stretch of story showing Holiday being pushed to the ground by an ungrateful lover before singing there about her misery – a near replica of the musical setup accorded to Bessie Smith in her only film appearance six years earlier.

Indeed, although the pleasures to be found here are chiefly musical, the narrative pretexts for these performances offer a fascinating look at how both jazz and Black musicians were perceived and expected to behave during the first three decades of talkies. At least half of the films are Soundies made for sound-and-image jukeboxes in the 40s, but even these often trade on narrative details such as the adoring women digging the solos by Ray Nance, Rex Stewart, Ben Webster, and others at an “eatery” after hours in Jam Session (1942), or the spectacular dancing by athletic jitterbugging couples in Hot Chocolate (Cottontail) from the same year.

Duke Ellington by Gordon Parks

Duke Ellington (live TV broadcast control room) photo by Gordon Parks, 1960. (c) Gordon Parks Foundation.

"Parks was seventeen when, in 1929, he first met Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington in the back of the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis. Parks [who] was living on the streets, playing piano in flophouses, hanging around nightclubs and pool halls, and skipping school [was] enthralled by Ellington’s style, grace, and musical genius.

Ellington became a hero for the young man. Decades later, in 1960, Parks was overjoyed by the opportunity to tour with Ellington’s band, calling it “a trip through paradise” (To Smile in Autumn, 1979). In his photographs, Parks revealed his admiration for the musician’s pensive elegance, magnetic personality, and exceptional stage presence." [source]

Duke Ellington in Isfahan

A shot from Duke Ellington in Isfahan

 
Duke Ellington in Isfahan is a short film that the author of this blog (Ehsan Khoshbakht) made in 2018 and slightly reworked in 2021 for festival release. Featuring jazz historian and musician Alyn Shipton, it's an archive-based documentary.

This short documentary by the Iranian filmmaker, writer and archivist Ehsan Khoshbakht tells the story of Duke Ellington's concert tour of the Middle East in 1963 and the development of one of the most beautiful jazz standards.  

The legendary composer and bandleader was seen as the ideal cultural ambassador for the United States at the height of the Cold War, when President Eisenhower's desired perception of the US as a moral force for good in the world was being undermined by an awareness of its treatment of African-Americans. 

Arriving in Iran with his band, Ellington was inspired by the historical city of Isfahan and especially its architectural riches. It would give its name to one of the pianist's most enduring compositions, and the tour as a whole helped to shape a Grammy Award-winning album, Far East Suite, which showed how much Ellington had absorbed from the sounds of his travels. 

Duke Ellington's Solo Piano at WWDC, 1946

Duke Ellington and Willis Conover

In the wee hours of April 21, 1946, Duke Ellington who was visiting Washington DC for a series of concerts at the Howard Theater, dropped in at WWDC station. 

The Duke's presence in his hometown was an auspicious event for Conover who recorded some shows and interviews with him for his radio station, celebrating Duke's homecoming. That day, at about two in the morning, Duke started tossing down some notes on the keys. Billy Strayhorn, Oscar Pettiford and some other members of his entourage were standing in the background. It was midnight music: heavy, messy, mysterious, rambling. Upon finishing the first piece, Willis Conover informed him that the whole thing was recorded on disc. Ellington sounded surprised but he kept playing while Conover and others chatted in the background. The chat died down, the music continued. When Ellington finished it was 2:35 AM. "Can I have a copy of that?," Ellington asked Conover.

Whether or not Ellington got a copy, we don't know. But we have a copy here to listen to:

David Meeker's Ten Favourite Jazz Films

Duke Ellington behind the scene of NBC's What Is Jazz? (1958) episode#1 [Source: GettyImages]

David Meeker, the author of Jazz in the Movies (and its online, massively updated version, Jazz on the Screen, available on the website of the Library of Congress), has been kind enough to furnish me with the list of his favourite jazz films. I don't think anyone in the world has seen as many jazz films as David has and certainly no-one has bothered spending years retrieving information (including song lists and personnel) from these films, compiling the indispensable encyclopedia that he has given us. For that reason, I think this list should be cherished more than other similar listings — this is the work of a man who has almost seen everything! - EK

By my reckoning the first ever sound film of a jazz performance was produced in 1922, a short featuring pianist Eubie Blake. Therefore, faced with almost 100 years of world cinema and taking a degree of masochistic pleasure in sticking my neck out I have managed with considerable difficulty to reduce untold millions of feet of celluloid to a necessarily subjective choice of 10 favourite titles, undoubtedly quirky but hopefully not pretentious. Try and see them if you can - they all have much to offer both intellectually and emotionally.

David Meeker

Willis Conover's Eulogy for Duke Ellington

This is mainly a detailed (and moving) description of Ellington's funeral. From a 1974 VOA's jazz hour broadcast.


This was the source.

The CBS Tribute to Duke Ellington, 1974

Broadcast on the day that the Duke died, featuring concert footage and interview with colleagues and band members such as Ella Fitgerald, Sony Greer, Russell Procope, Billy Taylor and Stanley Dance, this is a newly digitised tape.

Forgive the silly John Wayne clip and the sillier ads popping up which are good reminders of the crude world in which Ellington was creating his sophisticated and inimitable art.

The "Sacred" Revisited: A Duke Ellington Memorial

Duke Ellington with Anita Moore at the Rainbow Room, 1972, © Nancy Crampton

Featured here is a great filmed concert whose origins, exact date and the name of musicians are not known to me. Surprisingly, it's not listed either on Jazz on TV filmographies or the discography of the distinguished musicians involved.

This 30-minute-long video assembles songs from Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts, performed in his memory by a superb band which is not Ellington's orchestra or what was left of it at that time. The date, I guess, must be May 1986, when issuing the first postal stamp in Ellington's honor called for ducal festivities and all-star performances of his compositions.

The place? Maybe St. Patrick's Cathedral? If you're familiar with New York City, please go to 16' 12'' for an exterior shot of a church which I assume is the location of the concert.

Also, If you happen to know any of the band members seen in the video, please leave a comment. Those who are more easily detectable are Frank Wess (as), Slide Hampton (tb), Cecil Payne (bs, playing solo on My Love), and Billy Taylor (p). It's quite a line-up!

Vocalists are Priscilla Baskerville, Ellington's brother-in-law McHenry Boatwright, and Anita Moore who was the singer with Ellington Orchestra during the last two years of Duke's life (1972-74) up until the 1980s.

From the repertoire, the songs that I knew are listed below. Two remain unidentified.

Philip Larkin Picks His Favorite Jazz Albums of the Year (1960s)

Philip Larkin

During the 1960s, the English poet Philip Larkin, who also wrote jazz criticism of high caliber for Daily Telegraph, particpitaed in the game of picking the best records of the year.

For someone who thought Charlie Parker was the beginning of the end for jazz, and everything worth saying (and playing) was already exhausted by Louis Armstrong, the 60s must have been a difficult time to go to a record shop and come out satisfied.

Yet, Larkin, never hiding his conservative taste in jazz, comes out with a few delightful surprises (Miles, Mingus, and God forbid, Ornette!)

His annual entry for Telegraph mainly features a longer list of reissues than brief mentioning of what's new. I've only mentioned the "new" albums. But even the "new" ones indicate how sluggishly jazz records were distributed in the UK. There is usually a year or two time gap between the initial US release and the arrival of the record in British market.

There are two remarkable anthologies edited from his jazz criticism both of which highly recommended: All What Jazz and Reference Back. (The full list of his favorite records of the year can be found as the penultimate chapter of the latter book.) These two books feature some of the most memorable, beautiful use of metaphor and poetic language in jazz after Whitney Balliett.

Without further due, these are the albums that excited Philip Larkin:

RIP Joe Temperley (1929-2016)

Repost of Junior Mance and Joe Temperley Play Duke Ellington, in momery of Joe Temperley who passed away on May 11th 2016.


Some days ago, on October 10, Junior Mance entered his 85th, more than 7 decades of which lived as a jazz pianist of high caliber. Mance's notion and execution of blues, a happy and swinging one, has always been a source of endless fascination and joy for me. It is easy to be hooked to the sound of his trios, though in larger formats, like the video presented here, most of the relaxed playing and wonderful interaction remain intact.

In April 1994 Mance formed a long-lasting trio with bassist Keter Betts and drummer Jackie Williams, the former being his collaborator since the 1950s, when they both played for Dinah Washington.

This group enjoyed various gigs and hosted several guests at various occasions who were  mostly tenor-saxophonists with whom the band toured and recorded materials by Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. One of these guests was the Scottish multi-instrumentalist Joe Temperley who was only one year younger than Mance and a resident of the US since 1965. Aside from a live recording on-board a cruise ship, issued by Chiaroscuro, this video, recently digitized by me, is a vivid example of the quartet in action, filmed during the Bern jazz festival in 1997.

Listening to Duke Ellington - The Conny Plank Session, '70

Duke Ellington in Berlin's Tempelhof, Feb 15, 1963.

The Duke and the Dom

Death is not the end. If one doesn't agree with such statement from a theological point of view, it's impossible to reject it from a jazzological one. The evidence to the argument is a wealth of material discovered and released years after the passing of jazz musicians, anything from first class unissued studio recordings (which is the subject of this post) to poorly recorded airchecks whose sound of hiss is sometimes stronger than the lead saxophone. If posthumous releases are signs of life, then no other jazz musician has been more alive than Ellington whose death in 1974 was the beginning of a new musical life with many first-time issues hitting the market, mounting to hundreds of hours of good quality live and studio sessions.

One of these momentous and (almost) first-time issues, recorded in Germany in 1970, will be released on 10 July 2015 by Grönland Records, exactly 45 years after the fact.

Imagine the Duke standing next to the Dom, the celestial Cologne Cathedral, just two years after his second Sacred Concert and three years shy from the Third and the last, gazing at the dark, wounded stones, looking pensive. Then a young record engineer by the name of Conny Plank approaches him, invites him over to Rhenus studio, and play him some tracks. The mutual respect grows, Duke begins to like Conny's sound, and he records 6 tracks (2 compositions x 3 takes each) at the young man's studio.

The young engineer was on his way to international fame when later he recorded Kraftwerk, NEU!, Cluster, Eurythmics, Ultravox. (If you forgive my ignorance, none of these groups I've heard before. Browsing them on the YouTube wasn't a terribly rewarding experience. Sometimes I feel It wasn't entirely bad for me that western music was banned when and where I was growing up. Instead, I spent the first two decades of my life listening over and over to a few tapes of Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong.)

Duke Ellington & Orson Welles

Cab Calloway on the right, 1944.

The David Frost Show, circa June 1970.

The opening of The Blessed and the Damned at the Theatre Edouard VII in Paris. June 20, 1950.

Orson (composed by Billy Strayhorn-Duke Ellington)
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
LA, April 7, 1953

Duke Ellington (p); Clark Terry, Willie Cook, Cat Anderson, Ray Nance (t); Quentin Jackson, Britt Woodman, Juan Tizol (tb); Russell Procope (as, cli); Rick Henderson (as); Paul Gonsalves (ts); Jimmy Hamilton (cl, ts); Harry Carney (bs); Wendell Marshall (b); Butch Ballard (d).

Further reading at the Place, Man.

The Duke Ellington TV

Happy Birthday Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974)

Duke Ellington's Unreleased German Recording

According to JazzTimes, Grönland Records in Germany will release a previously unissued Duke Ellington session on July 10.

Produced in 1970 by Conny Plank who is mostly known for his work with Kraftwerk and Eurythmics, the session has been recorded at Rhenus Studio in Cologne from which you can listen to a take, Afrique, here:

3 Duke Ellington Films Restored

A Bundle of Blues (1933) [all images courtesy of Cohen Film Collection]

Duke Ellington was one of the Silver Screen's favorite personalities since the sound was introduced to cinema. The Duke's life on celluloid started with 1929 Black and Tan Fantasy and continued until the last days of his life. Among a wealth of visual material left behind after Duke's passing, the early films, for their presentation of best musicians in their glory days, are most precious, but also because of their age, less satisfactory in terms of sound and image quality.

In that regard, probably the best gift one could give to the members of Ellingtonia all around the world is the restoration and re-release of three Duke Ellington films, undertaken by Cohen Film Collection in the US whose new prints look like a Rembrandt picture being cleaned and removed from elements of dust and dirt by National Gallery. Now, you can see Black and Tan Fantasy, Symphony in Black and Bundle of Blues in very good to excellent qualities.

The digital restoration of the films was carried out by Cohen Film Collection at Modern Videofilm in Los Angeles, California. Originally produced by Paramount Pictures, U.M.&M. TV Corporation acquired the rights in 1954-55 along with approximately 1,600 other shorts from Paramount catalogue. The company removed the Paramount logo card from the original 35mm nitrate negatives and replaced them with the U.M.&M. TV title card. The original opening title card is not known to exist. [pic below]

Gjon Mili: When Jazz, Film and Photography Meet

Gjon Mili [pic above] is the photographer/filmmaker whose single cinematic achievement, Jammin' the Blues, changed the history of jazz on film. By bringing authenticity and artistic vision to capturing a performance on film, Mili was probably the first filmmaker who ever thought of transposing jazz, as an art form, into cinema.

Commissioned by Warner Bros. in 1944, Mili who was left free to choose the subject of his first short, turned to Norman Granz and asked him to put together a group of jazz musicians for a film which was meant to reconstruct the feeling of jazz after hours.

Granz not only invited some of his JATP stars, but also included some of the older, non-JATP musicians such as Sid Catlett (the original plan was to have Louis Armstrong on-board). The shooting was wrapped up in four sessions and the film reached the screens in December 1944 to critical acclaim. It was even nominated for an Oscar but lost it to Who's Who in Animal Land!

the last shot of Jammin' the Blues

70 years onwards, the UCLA film archive has restored the film and it's going to be screened as a part of the programme curated by me and Jonathan Rosenbaum for Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna.

Anyone who has seen this true gem of jazz cinema and is familiar with Mili's groundbreaking photography for Life, will immediately detect a concept practiced by Mili to perceive the filming opportunity as an extension of photographic work, studying bodies and gestures and exploring the relation between musicians and space around them -- the study of the physical energy of a performance.

The photographs that I've collected here, all taken by Mili, serve as an evidence to that argument and also demonstrate some of the most dense, telling compositions ever created in jazz photography.

Ellington Visits Finland

In February 1963, Duke Ellington And His Orchestra made their first trip to Finland. One year later, the jazz impresario Paavo Einiö brought the band back to Finland for a second time. The video above is from the first trip.