The Penguin Jazz Guide (28 page)

Born Edward Kennedy Ellington, 29 April 1899, Washington DC; died 24 May 1974, New York City

Piano

Never No Lament

RCA Bluebird 82876-50857-2 3CD

Ellington; Wallace Jones, Cootie Williams, Ray Nance (t); Rex Stewart (c); Joe ‘Tricky Sam’ Nanton, Lawrence Brown (tb); Juan Tizol (vtb); Barney Bigard, Chauncey Haughton (cl); Johnny Hodges (ss, as, cl); Harry Carney (bs, cl, as); Otto Hardwick (as, bsx); Ben Webster (ts); Billy Strayhorn (p); Fred Guy (g); Jimmy Blanton, Junior Raglin (b); Sonny Greer (d); Ivie Anderson, Herb Jeffries (v). March 1940–July 1942.

The Duke At Fargo

Storyville STCD 8316/8317 2CD

Largely as above. November 1940.

Gerry Mulligan said (1992):
‘The arrival of Jimmy Blanton was the birth of the modern rhythm section. It was like putting a new engine into a Rolls-Royce, except this was an engine you wanted to just listen to, and not just drive around with!’

Once all the late-’30s Ellington was back in print it became easier to see that he had been working towards this exceptional period for the band for a long time. Ellington had been building a matchless team of soloists, his own composing was taking on a finer degree of personal creativity and sophistication, and with the arrival of bassist Jimmy Blanton, who gave the rhythm section an unparalleled eloquence in the way it swung, the final piece fell into place. The 6 May 1940 session, which opens
Never No Lament
, is one of the great occasions in jazz history, when Ellington recorded both ‘Jack The Bear’ (a feature for Blanton) and the unqualified masterpiece ‘Ko-Ko’. From there, literally dozens of classics tumbled out of the band, from originals such as ‘Harlem Air Shaft’ and ‘Main Stem’ and ‘Take The “A” Train’ to brilliant Ellingtonizations of standard material such as ‘The Sidewalks Of New York’ and ‘Clementine’. The arrival of Billy Strayhorn, who stayed until he died in 1967, is another important element in the music’s success.

Of the many surviving location recordings of the Ellington band,
The Duke At Fargo
is surely the very best, catching over two hours of material from a single dance date in North Dakota, part of it broadcast but most of it simply taken down by amateur enthusiasts. Storyville released a 60th-anniversary edition of the music in 2000, handsomely presented. The sound is probably as fine as it will ever be. Here is one of the greatest Ellington orchestras on a typical night, with many of the best numbers in the band’s book and the most rousing version of ‘St Louis Blues’ to climax the evening. The sound is inevitably well below the quality of the studio sessions, but it’s a fine supplement to them, and a definitive glimpse into a working day in the life of one of the great swing orchestras.

& See also
Duke Ellington 1927–1929
(1927–1929; p. 28),
Duke Ellington 1937–1938
(1937–1938; p. 64),
Black, Brown And Beige
(1944–1946; p. 91),
Ellington At Newport
(1956; p. 189),
The Far East Suite
(1966; p. 336)

THE ’40s

Somewhere in the ’40s, a new style of jazz emerged, called bebop, an onomatopoeic term that has never been any more helpful than any of the other labels applied to the music, but which, oddly, has rarely been questioned by musicians themselves, perhaps because it emerged among them rather than in the reviewing media. Needless to say, bebop (or rebop or bop) was not new at all but an inevitable evolution from what had been happening in swing throughout the previous decade. One might unpretentiously liken it to the ‘inevitability’ of Richard Wagner’s new suspended harmony at a certain point in late Romanticism.

Part of the mystery of bebop is self-perpetuating. It is often claimed as a creative declaration of independence by African-American musicians, an attempt to raise jazz above the level of entertainment and to the status of a self-determining art form. To some degree this is the case, and the spasmodic virtuosity of bebop was in some measure a deliberate attempt to rid jazz of (mostly white) amateurs who had colonized black music and were making a substantial commercial and critical profit from it. Caliban had found his voice and his own book of spells.

However, the reality is more complex. The shift from big-band swing to small-band bop was as much about economic necessity as it was about artistic innovation. From the late autumn of 1941, the United States switched again to a war economy. Military conscription became an issue that was to have a lasting impact – largely negative, sometimes positive, often neutrally between the two, but ever-present – for the next 30 years and more. The ranks of big bands were thinned. At the market end of the equation, a new and stringent ‘cabaret tax’ meant that mounting live music became prohibitively expensive, encouraging small-group work in more unconventional places – music clubs rather than dance halls – while restrictions on the use of fuel – needed for the war effort – meant that driving across state lines, or even across a large metropolitan region, to see a favourite band was no longer possible. Having reached a peak of popularity around 1939, jazz became a minority enthusiasm again.

There were, of course, other implications arising out of the international situation, not least an influx of immigrants from fascist Europe, many of them musically educated, and in the opposite direction a fresh consideration of what American cultural values might mean abroad, both to the wartime allies and to the citizenry of the totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain and the Soviet Union. If the Cold War began in 1918, as seems obvious, then the presentation of jazz as a kind of 20th-century Americanism acquired a new importance during the actual hostilities, and with increasing vigour thereafter.

One of the reasons why bebop’s origins are somewhat shrouded is that the music emerged during a period when there were very few recordings being made. In its earliest incarnation, bop was a coterie music, played by a small avant-garde and enjoyed by a relatively exclusive and geographically delimited audience. Economic pressure was less significant here than a union ban on commercial recording, which lasted for much of the war. The American Federation of Musicians was alarmed that radio broadcasting was increasing pressure on music professionals by providing free-at-source entertainment that, in combination with wartime restrictions, prevented the majority of Americans from seeking out live entertainment in clubs and dance halls. There was a mutually reinforcing relationship between the rise of popular broadcasting, the availability of (relatively) cheap reproduction equipment and a new philosophy of domesticity in the US, often identified with the ’50s, but as is usual with such broad-brush cultural phenomena somewhat older. Americans did not go out as much as they had a decade earlier, even during the oddity of Prohibition.

The AFM wanted to levy a royalty from the recording companies to guarantee some kind of kickback to union members whose earnings had been curtailed by radio. Negotiations were blankly hostile and on 1 August 1942 (as American forces gathered in the Pacific for the attack on Guadalcanal) the union called a strike and ban on instrumental recording. Needless to say, the dispute did not mean an end to jazz recording. On the contrary, it nationalized production to some extent, with a War Department initiative on behalf of the Armed Forces Radio Service to provide recordings for the entertainment of troops in the field. Between early 1943 and the eve of the Korean War, more than seven million so called V-Discs (‘Victory’ Discs) were manufactured and distributed. The terms of the agreement with AFM stipulated that musicians would not be considered to be strike-breaking provided that all masters and surplus discs be destroyed at the end of the war. It will readily be judged from what follows how rarely that happened in practice.

The dispute was only finally settled – or temporarily settled, since there was a further strike between October 1947 and January 1948 – in November 1944, when the major labels, still Columbia and Victor, agreed to pay a small percentage royalty into a union fund. However, one or two labels had already settled. Among them was Blue Note, a new imprint founded in 1939 by German immigrant Alfred Lion and the Communist writer Max Margulis, who underwrote the project. Blue Note, which had originally been inspired by John Hammond’s ‘From Spirituals To Swing’ concert in 1938, was one of a number of new and independent jazz labels to emerge in the period. Jazz recording has historically flip-flopped between centrifugal and centripetal forces, the greater activity accumulating round major labels and corporations for a period, then devolving to a much larger number of small, specialist, sometimes niche imprints during periods when corporate investment in creative jazz becomes less generous and sympathetic.

Among the many new labels to appear in the ’40s were impresario Norman Granz’s Clef (later to hive off Norgran and Verve imprints and to become a large-scale operation), also Ross Russell’s Dial and Herman Lubinsky’s Savoy (who between them put out Charlie Parker’s greatest work), and record store owner Milt Gabler’s Commodore. Two of the most influential of all, Nesuhi Ertegun’s Atlantic and Bob Weinstock’s Prestige, only emerged at the end of the decade, but by then a creative infrastructure was complete …

HOT LIPS PAGE

Born Oran Thaddeus Page, 27 January 1908, Dallas, Texas; died 5 November 1954, New York City

Trumpet

Hot Lips Page 1940–1944

Classics 809

Page; Jesse Brown, Joe Keyes (t); Vic Dickenson, Benny Morton (tb); Earl Bostic, Benjamin Hammond, George Johnson, Floyd ‘Horsecollar’ Williams (as); Don Byas, Ike Quebec, Ben Webster, Lem Johnson, Lucky Thompson (ts); Ace Harris, Leonard Feather, Clyde Hart, Hank Jones (p); Sam Christopher Allen (g); Teddy Bunn (g, v); Al Lucas, John Simmons, Carl ‘Flat Top’ Wilson (b); Ernest ‘Bass’ Hill (b, bb); Big Sid Catlett, Jack ‘The Bear’ Parker, Jesse Price (d). December 1940, November 1944.

Nat Adderley said (1985):
‘Lips used to squeeze out notes so slow and thick they sounded like taffy; hot and sweet like taffy, too. All the guys used to listen to those records and I still hear the younger men trying to copy him.’

An Armstrong imitator who never quite made it out of that constricting sack, Page has always hovered just below the horizon. The negative viewpoint dismisses him as an accomplished player who wasted much of his considerable talent on pointless jamming and dismal
but lucrative rhythm and blues. More than 50 years after his death, though, Page still sounds fresh and vital, and more modern in his way than many more celebrated figures. His life story, as researched by Todd Bryant Weeks in
Luck’s in My Corner
, is fascinating. Page started out with Ma Rainey, then worked with Walter Page (not a relative) in the Blue Devils, and was with Basie in 1936, just before the band broke big. Page, though, was scouted by Joe Glaser and went solo. The material recorded for Bluebird in April 1938 features a band that might have gone places had Page not been forced to disband.

The title of this Classics volume is slightly misleading. There is, to be sure, material from 1940 and from 1944, but nothing in between. Some of the interim period is covered in various bootlegged jam sessions which may be available. The drummerless 1940 group with Feather, Bunn and Hill is very good indeed, with Hill a considerable surprise for a bass-player of his day. Page also shows off his touch on the now seldom used mellophone. The real treat on this volume, though, is the later material featuring Byas. As Anatol Schenker’s informative liner-notes suggest, ‘These Foolish Things’ made for Commodore is one of the high-points of ’40s saxophone jazz. There is some Savoy material from June 1944, a bigger group in which Byas has to give ground to the great Ben Webster; but it is the two dates for Milt Gabler’s label which stand out. Even the quasi-novelty items like ‘The Blues Jumped A Rabbit’ are excellent. It wouldn’t be a Classics volume without an early appearance from a star of the future. On the last session, from November 1944, Hank Jones makes his recording debut backing Page, Dickenson and the very fine Thompson on ‘The Lady In Bed’ and ‘Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good For You?’.

REX STEWART

Born 22 February 1907, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 7 September 1967, Los Angeles, California

Trumpet

Rex Stewart And The Ellingtonians

Original Jazz Classics OJC 1710

Stewart; Lawrence Brown (tb); Barney Bigard (cl); Billy Kyle (p); Brick Fleagle (g); Wellman Braud, John Levy (b); Cozy Cole, Dave Tough (d). July 1940–1946.

Bassist John Levy said (1984):
‘You know, some of the Ellington guys thought they were a cut above, because they were in the Duke’s orchestra. I never got a sense of that from Rex. He was just happy to be playing jazz and he didn’t mind who with. He did like it when he went to Paris and they shouted out his name, though.’

For trumpeters of the ’20s, Louis Armstrong was a model and a challenge. His achievement was so primal and so pre-eminent that it was extraordinarily difficult to see a way round or over it. Rex Stewart, a self-confessed Armstrong slave (though he also loved Bix), experienced the problem more directly than most when he took over Armstrong’s chair in the Fletcher Henderson orchestra.

In reaction to the inevitable but invidious comparisons, Stewart developed his distinctive ‘half-valving’ technique. By depressing the trumpet keys to mid-positions, he was able to generate an astonishing and sometimes surreal chromaticism which, though much imitated, has only really resurfaced with the avant-garde of the ’60s. As a maverick, Stewart was ideal for the Ellington orchestra of the mid-’30s, though some of his later sessions, despite the august company, step back a generation to the sound of the Hot Sevens. Stewart was never to lose that loyalty. He can even be heard singing in imitation of Pops here and there.