CD 1: Star-Spangled Banner//Farmer Norman O'Connor introduces the Duke & Orchestra; Duke introduces Tune and Anderson, Jackson & Procope//Black and Tan Fantasy//Duke Introduces Cook & Tune//Tea for Two//Duke & Band leave stage; Father Norman O'Connor talks about the festival//Take the 'A' Train//Duke announces Strayhorn's & Nance; Duke introduces Festival Suite, Part I & Hamilton//Part I - Festival Junction (Live)//Duke announces soloists; introduces Part II (Live)//Part II - Blues to Be There (Live)// Duke announces Nance and Procope; introduces Part III (Live)//Part III - Newport Up (Live)//Duke announces Hamilton, Gonsalves, & Terry; Duke introduces Carny & Tune (Live)//Sophisticated Lady (Live)//Duke announces Grissom & Tune (Live)//Day In, Day Out (Live)//Duke introduces Tunes and Paul Gonsalves Interludes (Live)//Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue (Live)//Announcements, Pandemonium (Live)//Pause
CD 2: Duke Introduces Johnny Hodges//I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)//Jeep's Blues//Duke calms crowd; introduces Nance and Tune//Tulip or Turnip//Riot Prevention//Skin Deep//Mood Indigo//Studio Concert//Father Norman O'Connor introduces Ellington; Ellington introduces New Work Part I//Part I - Festival Junction//Duke announces soloists; introduces Part II//Part II - Blues to Be There//Duke announces Nance and Procope; introduces Part III//Part III - Newport Up//Duke announces Hamilton, Gonsalves & Terry; Pause; Duke introduces Johnny Hodges; I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)// Jeep's Blues//Pause
Ellington’s career was more or less on the out in 1956. He was still good, and his band was still good – the new material debuted on this album shows that - but public interest simply wasn’t there. Two reasons are usually cited for this. On the one hand, big bands had been losing ground to individual singers since the 40s, until the point where they were more or less restricted to novelty acts. On the other, be-bop had hit, and jazz fans were being polarised to the point where the genre was becoming an intellectual rather than a popular pursuit. Complex, befuddling art may be great and all, but it seldom makes enough money to keep a touring unit of over twenty musicians in bread and board. Furthermore, Ellington was, let’s face it, a little out of his depth. His style of elaborately orchestrated, poppy composition had been groundbreaking and influential in its day, wasn’t the sort of thing that could be easily reconfigured into an Ornette Coleman track. His rhythm section couldn’t touch the fiery afro-Cuban grooves of Dizzy Gillespie. And after thirty years in the business, he maybe just didn’t have it in him to change it up. Isn't that the case? Obviously! Or:
The first half of this set doesn’t sound like a career-saving performance. It sounds like a very good performance by a band in top form, but not earth shattering. “Star Spangled Banner” is eerie and vaguely out of tune, and it’s the better for it. “Tea for Two” is modest but charming. After only two short tracks (one a rather unimpressive vocal) the band had to leave the stage due to missing personnel, but they came back later that night with a solid rendition if “Take the ‘A’ Train”, Duke’s signature tune as written by right-hand man Billy Strayhorn, who had returned to the fold after a brief stint as a solo artist and composer. Duke’s piano’s pretty decent here, I’ll admit, but the wonderful parping chorus is what really sells it.
“‘A’ Train” is followed by a wonderful three-part suite written especially for the festival. Ellington jokingly christens it “Festival Junction” on the spot. The first part is rather driving, opening with a strong theme pounded-out in chords on the piano. Then it swings into a lengthy, meandering section that eventually builds along some able support soloing up to a wonderful mournful solo on trumpet. This is thoroughly old-fashioned stuff, obviously – for a few moments at the start it looks like Duke is hinting at something more modern behind his piano, but then it slams straight into an old-time swing groove. The song closes out on a great trumpet solo right up into the mic as the backing drops-out, climbing up on a few ludicrous squeals to impressive heights.
The second part is far more subdued, coasting on a ride cymbal and some delicate syncopated piano work from Duke. “Blues to Be There” is appropriately almost more blues than jazz (again, incredibly old-fashioned) and it highlights the truth in Ellington’s reputation for refinement and sophistication. All in all, it’s very pretty, though more mood-oriented at first than immediately engaging. The clarinet work here is gorgeous. The backing drops out halfway for a brief scale, and then bam, back into the main theme on piano and some more New Orleans-style wah-wah trumpet, swaying into a beautiful swing section on the horns, consisting of little more than a few rising and falling notes. It’s at this point the band starts coming into its own, swinging into the rousing, up-tempo “Newport Up”, obviously geared with its brisk four-four towards a festival crowd. The trumpet tone here is very warm and tight, and quite lovely, but there’s not much to say aside from it being a very nicely done dance piece. The crowd reaction is enthusiastic, but modest.
“Sophisticated Lady” is all delicate reds and oranges and some lovely piano work – I do like the way Ellington cops so much from Debussy. It’s a charming rendition, complete with little stuttering horn riffs through the verse and a gently slide-out on the ride cymbal. Another vocal number follows, and it’s another modest success.
I suppose, if there’s been one problem up to this point it’s anyone who knows what’s coming. Up to this point, Ellington at Newport has been a very fine live document, easily up to many bands’ studio standards. With “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue” however, it leaps across to another level entirely. This is the famous bit – the solo by Paul Gonsalves that lasts a dizzying 27 choruses. Apparently they’d been experimenting with this for a while – the two halves of the song were always linked by a solo by Gonsalves, and the general idea was that he would just go out there and see what happened. This is the point where the night caught fire. The song dropped down to nothing but piano, bass and drums while Gonsalves carried the tune with his fine, simple soloing, until eventually everybody was crying out for him to keep it going like lunatics. It’s a strange moment that sort of creeps up on you. The solo starts, and it goes on for a bit, and then it just keeps on going, and the song become one long groove. The drums get heavier, accenting the rhythm with heavy crashes, and the piano starts pounding out a rudimentary groove before the song erupts into the brassy “Crescendo” (and Gonsalves presumably collapses of exhaustion). It’s a great deal of fun listening in on this moment. It’s a hell of a performance and enough alone to warrant getting this. The band put in everything they’ve got. Hell! It supposedly pulled a hot blonde in a cocktail dress from the crowd to start dancing, at a wimpy jazz concert in 1956. Listen to it loud.
Next up is “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)”, a fine number that Charles Mingus ripped-off for the “Alice” track from Mingus in Wonderland. It’s a showcase for Johnny Hodges on sax, and he does a great job. ‘Jeep’s Blues” is a big, brassy, swinging number with a great clarinet part. But even after this, the crowd didn’t want the set to end, and so we get “Tulip or Turnip”, which is a strong blues number and inarguably the best vocal performance on the album. The crowd hoot and holler through the whole thing, of course. They pile horns on horns and it’s a wonderful track. At this point they’ve largely ditched refinement and are going for the gut.
When this ended, the festival managers tried to shut the gig down. Ellington had Sam Woodyard play “Skin Deep”. This is, I’d argue, the absolute best track on here, and one of the most amazing drum tracks I’ve heard. It starts-out insane exotic horn stings and then turns into a thunderstorm of drums. Almost nothing but drums! Beautiful, amazing drums! If you know me, you know I love rhythm, and the one problem I have with Ellington on this album is his rather anaemic (at times) rhythm section. The moment where Woodyard’s double basses burst out from a series of random afro-Cuban patterings into an utterly heavenly syncopated groove is utterly breathtaking. And then it builds, at the end, to a crushing crescendo. It’s god damn beautiful.
I feel a little bad, on an album by such a man who was such a consummate composer and a generous band-leader, praising above all a really good drum solo. But, hey, that’s just how I roll. This whole album is damn solid, ranging from good to excellent. It’s damned long, but it never really feels it. When Ellington says goodbye, you’ll be howling no allowing with the folks in the audience on tape.
Of course, I haven’t even talked about the second disc. You see, having praised this album, there are now some rather knotty problems to untangle. Back in 1956, Ellington recorded this concert and then decided to release it as a live album, fair enough. But the recording quality wasn’t up to scratch. As a consequence, the band went into the studio following the festival and rerecorded sections of their performance to patch-up the holes. In the original recording, for example, you can’t even hear Gonsalves’ solo, since he played his trumpet into the wrong microphone. Well, that’s a problem, but only because a few years ago the folks at Columbia found a better quality recording of the night, one in which you can actually hear Gonsalves, and spliced it digitally with the original masters. As a consequence, we have here before us an excellent quality, stereo recording of the night – from a couple of years before stereo even debuted!.
The question is, which version do I review? I’ve already covered the live version, so that obviously predisposes my decision, but I will say a few words on the 1956 re-recording just to make sure that my reviews remain impossibly, tediously long.
We get a few pretty runs at “Festival Junction”, all of them greatly aided by being in the studio, and then we get the album proper, which consists of overdubbing audience noise and recreated stage banter onto the rerecorded set. The banter seems painfully stilted, and the album sounds like it was recorded in a concert hall rather than on a festival stage – although in the days before high fidelity stereo this may not have been a problem. We also lose “Diminuendo & Crescendo”, “Skin Deep” and “Tulip or Turnip” due to poor audio quality and the time constraints of the LP format. Other than that, though, it’s mostly the same album. It’s the same songs, anyway, and it’s still very fine. Large parts of the Festival suit have been re-done, but while the live versions are more energetic, the delicacy of “Blues to Be There”, for example, really shines on the studio cut. It’s easy to see why this, combined with the buzz generated by headlines regarding the ruckus at Newport, would reinvigorate interest in Ellington. This studio re-recording is an absolute gem – the performances argubaly better than the live version, if only because it captures approximately similar performances, but with far better recording quality and the tightness allowed by the studio environment. It’s wonderful! Christ, the soprano sax on “Newport Up”! The trumpet. You can harp about being genuine all you like – fraudulence gets results. The man was looking to salvage a career – would you risk a raw live cut or put everything you had into making yourself look like slickest bastard who ever tinkled an ivory? Everything hits harder! It just, you know, sounds better. As a studio recording should. And anyway, this is the album that’s been dazzling people for forty years.
So, it’s very hard to pick a favourite of the two, but in the end I’d argue that the original cut has the edge in polish, but the live recording matches it with energy, fascinating on-the-spot embellishments, and with the wider song selection, principally “America the Beautiful” and the two longer cuts missing from the LP. No matter how much nicer the studio versions sound, they can’t invalidate that drum solo and that amazing trumpet marathon. In any event, no matter how you cut it this is one of the best jazz albums I’ve ever heard. It was enough to bring a man back from the dead.
9/10
Download: Duke Ellington - Skin Deep.mp3
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