A Tone Parallel to Duke Ellington

THE STANDARD BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH in which the subject is born, did remarkable things, then died gets upended by Jack Chambers’s new Duke Ellington book. Titled A Tone Parallel to Duke Ellington, it satisfies that promise by looking at the man in terms of his music. Acknowledging Ellington’s own preference for terming much of what he did as “beyond category,” the book nevertheless proposes a number of categories that become lenses through which particular pieces of music are studied, revealing, in many cases, fascinating aspects of the man. If it sounds hifalutin’, fear not. Chambers makes it a very accessible journey.

Eleven chapters plot the journey, offering a remarkable variety of topics. Take “Forty-Eight Years with the Duke on Trains.” It serves the dual purpose of acknowledging Ellington’s love of that mode of travel (his most frequent use of which “coincided with the golden age of rail travel in the United States,” as Chambers notes) and the many effective songs he wrote that captured an essence of rail travel. 

Of course, the best-known, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” was written by Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn, and it’s a subway song, if you want to get technical, but the Ellington-written catalogue includes the beginner effort “Choo Choo (Gotta Hurry Home),” from 1924, just after he arrived in New York;  “Lightnin’” from 1932; “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” (1946); and the dazzling “Daybreak Express” (1932). About the last-named, Chambers writes:

Ad Nonsense

SUCH AN ENTICING OFFER! Subject the reader (that’s you) to an ad or two and you’ll start raking in the earnings in no time. Online revenue was making millionaires out of people far younger than I am, yet I was there at the beginnings of all this computers ‘n’ internet stuff, writing about it, for heaven’s sake, so why should I be left out.

And it would be so simple to get started. Just answer a few 
questions . . . 

As it happens, I went through that process already, soon after I started this blog in 2011, back when ad-clicks quickly turned into money and I actually got a couple of payments. Then it turned out that the majority – in fact, the entirety – of those clicks were coming from my wife’s workplace, as she generously pursued a campaign of putting some money in my pocket (thus avoiding having me take money out of hers). Google caught on, and ripped away my ad-revenue account.

Classic Vanguard Jazz Piano Sessions

HALFWAY THROUGH CD 3, which is given over to the protean Mel Powell, comes his Sonatina for Piano, nestled between the likes of “You’re Lucky to Me” and “Makin’ Whoopee.” The piece was included on the original Vanguard ten-inch LP release, an album titled “Mel Powell Septet,” the septet in question also including Buck Clayton, Henderson Chambers, Edmond Hall, Steve Jordan, Walter Page, and Jimmy Crawford, recorded at the end of 1953. High-powered players, and they really dig in on the four tracks where they’re included.

Of course they do. Powell was revered by the jazz community at this point in his career, acknowledging his dynamic jazz piano playing, composing, and arranging, most notably with Benny Goodman in the late 1930s – at which point Powell was still in his ‘teens. His earliest piano studies were in the classical realm, but a performance by Teddy Wilson so astonished him that he veered into jazz, with outstanding results. Powell’s Army stint during World War II put him in Glenn Miller’s Army-Air Force Band; while in liberated Paris at the end of the war, the French-fluent Powell sat in with Django Reinhardt and visited the Bibliotheque Nationale’s Debussy archive, celebrating one of Powell’s all-time heroes and inspiring his composition “Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra,” which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

You can see Powell in the 1948 film “A Song Is Born,” a vehicle for the always-annoying Danny Kaye but which contains a fantastic jazz sequence in which the incredibly youthful-looking Powell is joined by Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Louis Bellson, and the Golden Gate Quartet. But it won’t prepare you for this Sonatina.

Lorin Maazel in Cleveland

THE CENTERPIECE of this 15-CD set is an appealing Beethoven symphonies cycle spread across seven CDs to replicate the initial LP box-set release. (That actually was an eight-record set, but a judicious shift of some overtures reduced the count.) Mired as I was in vinyl during my formative years, I don’t mind this approach. I don’t need all 80 CD minutes filled, and I’m still spared the side-flip in the middle of a symphony.

Lorin Maazel led the Cleveland Orchestra in those Beethoven sessions beginning in October 1977, with the recording of Symphonies 3 and 5 and a trio of overtures; the following February they taped 6 and 7 and, on a single-day marathon, 1, 2, 4, and 8. (Donald Rosenberg’s biography of the orchestra disagrees and spreads out the sessions, but I prefer to believe the superhuman marathon approach.)

The ninth, saved for last, was recorded on October 13, 1978, and included the voices of Lucia Popp, Elena Obraztsova, Jon Vickers, and Martti Talvela, with Robert Page leading the Cleveland Orchestra chorus. Excellent vocal work in a thirlling finale. In an audacious move, the symphonies came out the following March as that eight-LP set. Although maybe it wasn’t so audacious: Had the symphonies hit the shops as individual items, buyers probably would play favorites, leaving poor 1 & 2 and 4 & 8 to languish.