fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
New York City will host several events to mark the 100th anniversary of Billy Strayhorn’s birth. Details can be found at a special centennial website. Ah, to be in New York this autumn. Fortunately, we all have access to his incredible body of music. Here’s just a short selection of recommendations and some of my favorite…
The homophobia that Joe Morgen, Duke Ellington’s publicist, possessed only reflected the homophobia of the society at large in the late 1950s. Around the time the New York Times ignored Strayhorn in its review of Such Sweet Thunder, a move undoubtedly engineered by Morgen, the Amsterdam News, Harlem’s daily, published a series of articles and…
Bebop hit the scene in the early 1940s and grew as the decade progressed. Rhythm and blues got more attention as the 40s rolled to a conclusion. Thus, by 1950, club owners began booking smaller R & B combos and jazz joints booked bebop combos. It was cheaper to pay 4-6 musicians than a large…
1939 was a good year for a composer/arranger to join the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Several important musicians joined its ranks around this time, adding to the band’s considerable aural palette. Jimmy Blanton freed the bass from its simple time-keeping role and made it a fluid, melodic instrument. This is best heard on the track “Jack…
For the first few years of his life, Billy Strayhorn didn’t have a name. His parents had buried two of three children born before him, so when the new born started life sickly, with rickets, they did not rush to name him. He was called “Baby Boy Strayhorn” on his birth certificate. The rickets went…
I walked into the SF Jazz Center to see the Wayne Shorter Quartet whistling “Tom Thumb” from Mr. Shorter’s 1967 release Schizophrenia. I mean, why not whistle “Tom Thumb”? However, I held no expectation that the Quartet would play this venerable classic or any other venerable classic from Maestro Shorter’s long and distinguished career. They…
Our band will never sound the same again. – Duke Ellington, after the passing of Johnny Hodges Not a minute of this Thanksgiving will go by without my thoughts turning time and again on my brother Robert. This will be the first Thanksgiving since his passing. To be sure, we did not gather last year,…
The Eastbourne Performance Duke Ellington hated endings, as I’ve noted in previous entries. He dreaded his own mortality the most, as many of us do. In 1971, he was probably already suffering early symptoms of the cancer that would ultimately take his life. By 1973, those symptoms were ever-present. He tired easily. His legendary patience…
Togo Brava Suite There are two CDs by this title. One is a studio session of never released tracks of the sort that Duke Ellington recorded when he wanted to hear how certain pieces in development sounded. It features a seven movement Togo Brava Suite. Don’t get this recording. Instead, hunt for the largely out-of-print…
Sometime in 1931 Duke Ellington hit the road in earnest for the first time. Commentators noted that he was able to make a “graceful” exit from the mob-owned Cotton Club in Harlem by arranging Cab Calloway and His Orchestra to take his place. The Cotton Club gig had been good to him, though. It gave…
