fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
Duke Ellington’s Famous Orchestra had many great soloists. Indeed, it was a band of great soloists. But one stood a notch above them all, alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. Jazz writer Scott Yanow states that Hodges possessed “the most beautiful tone ever heard in jazz.” He formed his style early in his career and never varied…
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…
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…
{Ed. note: Much of the biographical information in this article is supported by Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hajdu (North Point Press, 1996).} By the time the Duke Ellington Orchestra went on their first State Department-sponsored tour, which yielded The Far East Suite, long-time Ellington co-composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn was already a…
In 1956, during the halcyon days of the Cold War and immediately after the McCarthy era, the US State Department began an interesting experiment. Take some of America’s top jazz talent and put them on tour to spread goodwill and music to the people’s of the world. They selected Dizzy Gillespie, a showman’s showman, to…
My mom used to say of Mozart that one can like only a third of Mozart’s music and still like a lot of Mozart. Very true. In his short 30 years of composing he wrote a staggering number of pieces. The Köchel catalog of Mozart’s work, which has been revised many times to accommodate newly discovered…
