Sugar on the Day of the Duke (HDED!)
“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”― Ludwig Wittgenstein
Happy Duke Ellington Day, a day that should be a national holiday, celebrating the greatest American composer of the 20th century. From the 1920s to the 1970s, Duke Ellington consistently wrote, recorded and performed an ever evolutionary style of Jazz, a constantly defining style, leaving behind a musical legacy that is almost impossible to fully conceive. I have over seventy Duke Ellington records: studio records, live records, bootlegs of his radio programs and dinner club appearances (Mel Tormé helped release several great discs in the 60s) and there are still SO many more to collect and they are for the most part all great.
I have posted yearly on this day, on this DUKE ELLINGTON DAY….if you want to read some great stories or get turned on to some of his best recordings, you can go here or here or here or here.
For this Duke Ellington day, I want to go back a century. 1925 was a big year for Duke. He started appearing on recordings the year before, but in ‘25 he saw the release of the first record with his name on it as the band he led, The Washingtonians, became Duke Ellington and the Washingtonians.
Ellington had left his hometown of DC for The Big Apple in the early 20s, where he joined The Washingtonians. The Washingtonians, also from Washington and led by Elmer Snowden, went to New York thinking that the great Fats Waller was going to be their piano player. But when the band showed, Waller was not around and they settled on this young guy who had made a name in their hometown, Duke. When Snowden left the band in 1924 over some money issues, Ellington became it’s reluctant leader (a deep dive on Snowden’s career can be found here…he eventually made it to San Francisco and played with Turk Murphy). While there are no recordings that feature Snowden and Ellington together, the Ellington-led Washingtonians released their first 78 the year he took over.
The story is told that all Ellington needed was a platform, in this case a band, to begin to show his songwriting and arranging genius and compete with the plethora of great jazz pianists in New York. The single in question was released on Perfect Records and features two songs he did not write, I’m “Gonna” Hang Around My Sugar, written by Tin Pan Alley alum Jack “Everybody Loves My Baby” Palmer and pianist Spencer “Basin Street Blues” Williams, and Trombone Blues written by Williams and Fletcher Henderson trombone player Teddy Nixon. Playing with Duke on these Washingtonians records are three musicians who went on to be in the first classic Duke Ellington Orchestra: childhood friend and clarinetist Otto Hardwick, who was with the Duke Ellington Orchestra until 1946, clarinetist Prince Robinson, and banjo player Fred Guy, who stayed in Duke’s band until 1949.
The music on these recordings has a Dixie Land style, complete with its everybody-improvises-around-the-beat-and-melody structure, with Duke sitting by the piano, hitting his instrument uncharacteristically hard. These songs are beginning touchstones, rollicking yet not genius, but marking the moment where Ellington was realizing his voice, his recorded voice, his voice as a leader. He was only two years (1927 to be exact) away from finding true fame at the Cotton Club, and a radical departure from the 1925 sound into the complex, more orchestrated, swing that defined the Harlem Renaissance.
But this is where it began.
Happy Birthday Duke!
Bill Milkowski featured a sweet piece on Duke today in his newsletter, Musings of Music by the Milkman.
ROVER: Or Beyond Human - The Venusian Future and the Return of the Next Level
I met producer Matthew Thurm this past weekend. While talking about b-movies, he told me about his crazy film about the Heaven's Gate cult that cost less than $100,000. What happens if members of the Branch decide to film themselves going through the last steps towards their goal? This is the more modern version of a Ray Dennis Steckler film. A rolick.
Our lost interview with Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür
I have been on a total Kraftwerk kick since seeing them at the Greek a few weeks back….digging into what all the past members are up to now…what music they are making if any. This interview with longtime member Wolfgang Flür is great, really worth a read.
Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
A fantastic, super interesting read: “Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.”
The Quatermass Xperiment returns: Hammer’s Sci-Fi classic restored
I did not know the Hammer horror empire started with Sci-fi and I cannot wait to see this film.
“Names tether people to historical records. Names are what let us trace people through old newspapers and books, census records and legal documents, family memories, and community gossip. Names are what transform the anonymous people in old photographs into particular individuals with complicated stories of their own.”
Jet
By: Tony Hoagland
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth
and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,
and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.
And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though
no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have