Customer Reviews

All Star Road Band 1

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This is one of the best Ellington records you can own - and I state that as the owner of several score of his disks. And it is one of the best live jazz recordings around. If nothing else, Paul Gonsalves playing "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" here is worth far more than the price of admission. He had made this tune famous at Newport a few months before, but here, after a few months of nightly practice in front of audiences, he far surpasses himself.

As I recently wrote a friend:

As you may know, Ellington kept his band together as a continuous unit from late 1920s to his death in 1974. Members left and were replaced, but the band stayed together as an organic unit for that entire time, which is quite unique in the history of jazz. He considered the band, or Orch., as he called it, to be his instrument, and he wrote music for specific players - not just any trumpeter, but for Cootie Williams, say, with his specific tone and range and talent and personality.

After the war, bop ascended and swing went into steep decline, but Ellington still wanted and needed to keep his band together, if only to hear his own music realized, so he ended up playing lots of one-nighters across the country, traveling by bus and car - vs. the private Pullman the band used in the 1940s, largely to avoid problems finding hotels in segregated America. This was the only way to keep the band working and the players paid.

In 1956, the band had appeared at Newport Jazz Festival, where this tune, "D&C in Blue," with its "wailing interval," a multi-chorus improv by tenor player Paul Gonsalves, blew the audience away. So much so, in fact, that a week or two later, Time magazine featured Duke on its cover - something to the effect of, He's Back! The Newport concert was released as a record and for years, it offered (I think) the only live recording of this famous tune.

But during the months following Newport, poor Gonsalves, now famous, got called on to play this tune and its long solo at every gig, night after night. And one evening in Fall 1956, Duke and Orch. landed in Carrolltown, Pa., playing the high school auditorium, with its less-than-great piano - a fairly typical gig of this period, except that someone that evening, someone who knew what they were doing, managed to set up a good tape recorder and capture the concert.

It was not until 1984, however, that the Carrolltown concert was finally released on LP. And it turns out to be a real gem - indeed, it's the disk that first turned me on to Ellington, whose music I had found somewhat difficult some years before. (I was more attuned to Benny Goodman.) In some ways, it's flawed. Over the course of the evening, many in the band had been drinking, and towards the end, there is some squeaking in the woodwinds that is not usually heard. But all in all, everyone is having a grand time, and playing their best and encouraging each other during solos, and Ellington, despite the junky piano, is as gracious as ever - as you can hear in his intro spiel to Sunny Side of the St., ... And when Gonsalves plays D&C, he blows the roof off, far outpassing his legendary performance at Newport.

And to think, these guys were playing so wonderfully for people out in the sticks, out for an evening of dance at a high school in the middle of nowhere. What a gift! What a great artist and man Ellington was!