Archives for July 2005

In Rifftides a month or so ago, you may have read,

Jazz albums should have program notes. Listeners want and deserve information about the music.

You can read the rest of that post by clicking here. I admit self-interest; I sometimes write album essays. Nonetheless, as a listener, I count on program notes to fill me in on the backgrounds of players, composers and arrangers and, often, on the music itself. Writers of liner notes, definitely including this one, depend on discographers. Discographers are unsung heroes.

Discography. The systematic cataloguing of sound recordings. Data for listings, in which aspects of the physical characteristics, provenance, and contents of sound recordings themselves (with their containers and any accompnaying written and iconographic materials) as well as from logbooks, lists, and catalogues compiled by the record producer or manufacturer, journals and other printed materials, and oral sources.—New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

Simply put, the discographer finds out who recorded, when, where and with whom. If that seems trivial, it is not. Much of jazz history has taken place in recording studios and much of it would be lost if discographers did not painstakingly dig it out, verify it and make it available. For purposes of study, jazz recordings are the equivalent of classical scores or popular sheet music. Accurate information about them is not only desirable, it is essential. Perhaps the best analogy is the field of baseball statistics. Two of the pioneers among discographers, in the 1930s, were the Frenchman Charles Delaunay and the Briton Hilton Schleman. They were followed by Charles Edward Smith, Frederic Ramsey, Brian Rust, Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Walter Bruyninckx and Tom Lord, all authors of general discographies. There are also many discographers specializing in specific styles, periods and individual musicians.
I’m singling out a pair of contemporary general discographers who, it seems to me, are making a valuable contribution. They are Michael Fitzgerald and Steve Albin. The difference between Fitzgerald-Albin and nearly everyone else in the field is that they offer their work on the internet. On their website, they make a persuasive case that the web is the best tool for discography, better than print, better than the CD-ROM. They write in “A Philosophy of Jazz Discography”:

Online discographies are ever malleable, readily accepting additions and corrections and immediately substituting the new version for the old.

You can read all of the explanation, find out how to use their system, which Albin developed and calls Brian (after Brian Rust), and roam through the listings by going to his site, which is cleverly named www.jazzdiscography.com. Fitzgerald and Albin have more than fifty musicians in their discography and are planning on adding many more. They include the famous (Frank Sinatra, compiled by Albin) and the semi-obscure (John Neves. Before you go, for those new to discograpy entries, here’s a sample from the www.jazzdiscography.com listing for Sir Charles Thompson, compiled by Bill Gallagher.

Date: March 2, 1945
Location: Los Angeles
ldr- Coleman Hawkins; t- Howard McGhee; tb- Vic Dickenson; ts- Coleman Hawkins; p- Sir Charles Thompson; g- Allan Reuss; b- Oscar Pettiford; d- Denzil Best
Rifftide (Coleman Randolph Hawkins)
Hollywood Stampede – 03:07 (Coleman Randolph Hawkins)
I’m Through With Love – 03:11 (Gus Kahn, Joe Livingston, Matty Malneck)
What Is There To Say – 03:17 (Vernon Duke, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg)
Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams – 03:04 (Harry Barris, Ted Koehler, Billy Moll)
“Hollywood Stampede” is mistitled on the Extreme Rarities issue (#1008) as “Sweet Georgia Brown.” “Hollywood Stampede” also appears in the film “Crimson Canary.” “Rifftide” was unissued but a tape exists.

I wonder how many of you knew that Coleman Hawkins’s middle name was Randolph. I didn’t. Nor did I know, until I read this entry, that “Rifftide” was recorded again after the famous Hawkins Capitol date of February 23, 1945, with Vic Dickenson added. That sort of thing is trivia to some, valuable information to others. Enjoy your visit to Michael Fitzgerald’s site. Hurry back, if you can tear yourself away.

Fellow artsjournal.com blogger, indefatigable all-purpose arts critic and small-town New Yorker Terry Teachout is visiting home, down where Missouri meets Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky. He customarily refers to it as Small Town USA, but by giving us a link to the hometown paper, he’s blown the town’s cover. Tourists will be piling in there by the busload, hoping for a glimpse of his birthplace. Terry is giving a speech there, and the local paper interviewed him in advance.

Teachout noted he wrote his first story for publication for the Sikeston High School newspaper, Bulldog Barker, and plans to talk Tuesday about how the world of journalism has changed, especially by the Internet and new media, since he began writing,
“When I started doing this, I wrote on a manual typewriter. Nobody had a computer,” Teachout said.

You can read the whole story here.
TT’s mention of typewriters recalled my typewriter story from the same period. In 1975, I had just taken over the news department of KSAT-TV in San Antonio. We were drastically underequipped and misequipped. When I wrote my first budget, I put in for ten IBM electric typewriters to replace the broken-down manuals the reporters battled every day. The general manager supported me, but the president of the broadcasting company went through the roof. “A bunch of journalists don’t need that fancy equipment,” he said. “They’d just break it.”
Such was the speed of the electronic revolution in TV that within a couple of years, film was out, tape was in, the reporters went from manual typewriters to computers and were doing live reports from the field by microwave.

It is unlikely that there will be a new posting today. The Rifftides staff is on deadline. But, you never know, we could finish early and file something. Watch this space.
As always, we appreciate it when you tell people interested in jazz and other matters about our venture and direct them to Rifftides. Thanks.

I am adding the writer and musician John Robert Brown’s website to the Other Places list in the right-hand column, and not just because he wrote this:

Occasionally a publication changes one’s thinking. Take Five is such a book. I am old enough to have attended several of Desmond’s concerts back in the 1950s. Doug Ramsey’s account rekindled my respect, taught me more than I had ever imagined about its subject, propelling me into a Desmondmania that set me on a revisionist crusade of buying old Brubeck CDs and raving to my friends about my re-discoveries.

Mr. Brown is, among other things, chairman of the Clarinet and Saxophone Society of Great Britain. Some of the articles on his site are devoted to reed players and instruments, and some are simply fascinating reading for people with a general interest in jazz and other matters. Here he is on interviewing Maria Schneider at a big convention of jazz people:

Her Thursday evening concert in the massive Imperial Ballroom of the Manhattan Sheraton, though pitted against three other simultaneous events, was signed ‘house full’. Currently, Maria Schneider is big news. I had arranged to meet her during the afternoon, after a radio interview, in a public area.
Though she had seen me waiting, and acknowledged me, I couldn’t get near for the many enthusiasts wanting to speak to her. When eventually we did meet (it took fifteen minutes), the interrupting fans made it difficult to greet her, and impossible to escort her to the interview lounge. Eventually Schneider coached me in the correct body language. “Look at me and keep talking,” she advised. “Then we won’t be interrupted.”

Click here to read the interview. Then, roam around Mr. Brown’s site. Don’t miss his disquisition on how to pronounce the name of the letter H. It’s under the “General” heading. And I couldn’t resist showing you this lead from an article in his classical section.

A Ford Transit van parked in a leafy side street in north Leeds catches my attention. Finished professionally in silver and black, it bears the words: The Keyboard Academy. The piano keys painted on the side of the vehicle leave no doubt that music teaching is involved. Plainly, this is no van ordinaire.

There’s no pun like a bilingual pun. It’s in a piece about a mobile piano school.

Rifftides is not a way station for announcements, but if something comes up that I think you’d want to know about, well, of course. This is from trumpeter Marvin Stamm.

If you are of a mind – and awake – please tune tonight – July 26 – to JaiJai Jackson’s new jazz radio show at www.xradio.biz/lasvegas from 8-10pm West Coast Time…. just scroll down to “Woman of Jazz” and listen in!
JaiJai (Chubby Jackson’s daughter) will be interviewing me and playing tunes from The Stamm/Soph Project Live at Birdland and from By Ourselves, my duo CD with pianist Bill Mays.

The Stamm/Soph Project includes Mays, drummer Ed Soph and bassist Rufus Reid, with guitarist John Abercrombie on several tracks. Mays’ “In Her Arms” and Reid’s “When She Smiles Upon Your Face” are highlights. Consider both CDs recommended with enthusiasm.

In his newsletter, Blowing My Own Horn, the pianist Hal Galper (Cannonball Adderley, Phil Woods, his own trio) writes,”In truth, I’m a free player in bebopper’s clothing.”

You might find my history of free playing illuminating. In my early Boston days (the 1960’s) I had the good fortune to apprentice with Sam Rivers for 6 years. At the time with Phil Morrison on bass and Tony Williams on drums, followed by my old partner in crime Steve Ellington. We were playing free inside the tunes trying to make them accessible to our audiences by hiding how free we were playing by keeping a groove while still trying to be melodic. (It was many years later that Tony brought the concept, and Sam, into Miles’s band [Davis – ed.]). Eventually we recorded a quartet album for Blue Note, A New Conception.

To read the whole thing in printable PDF format, go here. The Rifftides staff also recommends Galper’s website for its news and his forthright views.

To your right, you will find a brand new batch of Doug’s Picks.

Regarding the Rifftides posting about the late Tom Talbert, and comments in later editions, Larry Kart writes from Chicago:

I bought Bix Duke Fats when it came out (in the days when you could listen in your local record shop to things by people you’d never heard of before) and since have acquired everything (I think) of Talbert’s that has been issued. He was special. Among other things, I love the way he could set up particular soloists in order to draw out their gifts—e.g. George Wallington and Aaron Sachs on Bix Duke Fats. Joe Wilder, too, of course, but there I think Talbert was working with what was evident to all, while with Wallington and Sachs, Talbert perhaps zeroed in on parts of their musical souls that lay a bit below the surface or had not been showcased as effectively before—e.g. what Talbert referred to, wonderfully, as Wallington’s “slow-smiling wit.”

While I never had the pleasure of meeting Talbert, his notes to Bix Duke Fats suggest that he must have been a very witty, sophisticated man. I remember in particular his remark about Bix being a “moderne” experimentalist as a composer, in contrast to a full-fledged modern artist like Picasso, who was not experimenting but realizing exactly what he was going for. That distinction made a big impression on my unformed adolescent mind. (BTW, I notice that the CD booklet for Bix Duke Fats removes both the reference to Bix being “moderne” and the contrast to Picasso.)

Larry Kart’s new book is Jazz In Search of Itself (Yale). I’ve mentioned it before. It deserves at least two plugs.

A reader sent a message taking me to task for shameless hucksterism.

Can a week go by without you plugging your book? I count 21 mentions since mid June.

So many? I’ll try to watch it. I won’t tell you the subject of my interview with Megan Marlena of KKJZ, Los Angeles. I guess you’ll just have to tune in or go to the station’s web audio stream and find out. It will run at 6:35 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. PDT (9:35 and 11:35 EDT) tomorrow, Wednesday.

It is a challenge to create eleven songs on demand, which is why so many albums consisting entirely of originals are less than compelling. The success rate is high in A Sense Of Wonder, a compact disc of songs written by the veteran Australian tenor saxophonist Laurie Lewis and his lyricist wife Alwyn. Young Heather Stewart sings the songs with a sweet innocence. She handles lyrics well and has good intonation, not an epidemic among vocalists. The jewel of the collection is “Don’t Ask.” I am also taken with the regretful “Rather Than Love” and the title song. Lewis, pianist Mark Fitzgibbon and guitarist Doug de Vries have relaxed solos throughout.

If you would like to get in touch—I hope—use the e-mail address under Contact in the right-hand column. I try to answer communiques with all possible dispatch. In other words, if it take a few days, please be patient. The Rifftides staff would appreciate your recommending us to your friends and neighbors. The audience seems to be growing, but there is room for expansion. More is more.

The CBS Radio Weekend News Roundup is running Correspondent Bill Vitka’s report on Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. Based on Vitka’s interview with the author, it is a brilliantly produced min-documentary about four minutes long. Wait ’til you hear what he did with “Petrouchka.” Click on this link. When the CBS window comes up, scroll down to item 4 and click on “Author Interviews.” The segment is at 3:55, after one with Howard Bryant on his book about steroids in baseball; Take Five following strike three.

DevraDoWrite went to guitarist Jim Hall’s concert last night at the 92nd Street Y in New York. She liked it.

My reaction is favorably biased, of course, as Jim is my dad, but it was a great concert, really. I’m not going to review it — hopefully someone else will, but I will tell you that my favorite part of the program was the second half. That’s when an unusual string section consisting of six cellos and six violas played on three compositions: a Jim Hall original titled October Song, an arrangement of John Lewis’ “Django” featuring Jim along with guitarist Peter Bernstein, and “Goodbye” by Gordon Jenkins featuring Joe Lovano on clarinet and soprano saxophone.

Go here for all of Devra’s comments. Someone else did review the concert…Zan Stewart in The Star Ledger (Newark). His first line: “Jim Hall is a giant of jazz guitar.” He liked the concert, too.

Flugelhornist Tom Harrell offered breathy, singing lines on “With a Song in My Heart,” as Hall backed him with almost scratchy-sounding chords, then soloed with the warm, full sound that recalled his early career work. And there was tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, who teamed with the honoree for the saxman’s “Blackwell’s Message.” Hall soloed with ideas that ranged between abstract and grounded.

All of Stewart’s review is here.

Paul Conley of KXJZ in Sacramento turned an interview about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond into a masterly short program. Conley, who has produced several excellent shows in the NPR Jazz Profiles series, added an announcer introduction, worked in music clips and seasoned the segment with sound bites from Dick Johnson. Johnson was the leader who enticed Desmond away from the Band Box in 1949, leaving Dave Brubeck scuffling…and furious with Paul. (They reconciled. Sorry to spoil the suspense.) To hear the piece, click on this link, then click on “Listen.”

Following the most recent rounds of atrocities—Iraq, London—a friend wanted to talk. He did not have comforting insights into mankind’s oldest philosophical question, nor did I. I don’t know whether Miller Williams has the answer, but this distinguished American poet ponders it beautifully. With his permission, here is one of his finest poems.

Why God Permits Evil:
For Answers to This Question
Of Interest to Many
Write Bible Answers, Dept. E-7

—ad on a matchbook cover

Of interest to John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas
for instance and Job for instance who never got

one straight answer but only his cattle back,
With interest, which is something, but certainly not

any kind of answer unless you ask
God if God can demonstrate God’s power

and God’s glory, which is not a question.
You should all be living at this hour.

You had Servetus to burn, the elect to count,
bad eyes and the Institutes to write;

you had the exercises and had Latin.
the hard bunk and the solitary night;

You had the neighbors to listen to and your woman
yelling at you to curse God and die.

Some of this to be on the right side;
some of it to ask in passing, Why?

Why badness makes its way in a world He made?
How come he looked for twelve and got eleven?

You had the faith and looked for love, stood pain,
learned patience and little else. We have E-7.

Churches may be shut down everywhere,
half-written philosophy books be tossed away.

Some place on the South Side of Chicago
a lady with wrinkled hose and a small gray

bun of hair sits straight with her knees together
behind a teacher’s desk on the third floor

of an old shirt factory, bankrupt and abandoned
except for this just cause and on the door:

Dept. E-7. She opens the letters
asking why God permits it and sends a brown

plain envelope to each return address.
But she is not alone. All up and down

the thin and creaking corridors are doors
And desks behind them: E-6, E-5, 4, 3.

A desk for every question, for how we rise
blown up and burned, for how the will is free,

for when is Armageddon, for whether dogs
have souls or not and on and on. On

beyond the alphabet and possible numbers
where cross-legged, naked, and alone,

there sits a pale, tall, and long-haired woman
upon a cushion of fleece and eiderdown

holding in one hand a handwritten answer,
holding in the other hand a brown

plain envelope. On either side, cobwebbed
and empty baskets sitting on the floor

say In and Out. There is no sound in the room.
There is no knob on the door. Or there is no door.

©1999 by Miller Williams

Williams wrote and read the inaugural poem at the beginning of President Bill Clinton’s second term in 1997, four years after Maya Angelou was the inaugural poet as President Clinton began his first term. In a PBS program, The Inaugural Classroom, a 12th grader asked Williams how it felt to be compared to Angelou.

“She writes opera and classical music,” Williams said, “and I write jazz and blues.”

The late poet John Ciardi summed up Williams this way:

Miller Williams writes about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives. Even more remarkable is how, doing this, he plays perilously close to plain talk without ever falling into it; how close he comes to naked sentiment without yielding to it; how close he moves to being very sure without ever losing the grace of uncertainty. Add to this something altogether apart, that what a good reader can expect to sense, coming to these poems, is a terrible honesty, and we have among us a voice that makes a difference.

“Why God Permits Evil” appears most recently in Williams’s collected poems, Some Jazz a While. To learn more about Miller Williams, go here.

The New York pianist George Ziskind observed the changing of the guard at a venerable New York jazz institution and sent us this report.

Monday night I attended the opening shot of this year’s “Jazz in July” event at the 92nd Street Y. Dick Hyman, who had long been artistic director of this annual jazz concert series, recently passed that baton to Bill Charlap – and Bill has already made some significant innovations in programming. (Like, how about “The Front Line: Small Group Jazz of Horace Silver and Kenny Dorham”)
I attended a master class co-helmed by Charlap and Ted Rosenthal. That alone is reason enough to have been there – two wizard players, both of whom know how to defeat the dreaded “muddy gene” that so often destroys the music when two pianists, no matter how good, play simultaneously.
But this was way more than two good players on two Steinway B’s: four students from Manhattan School of Music played two tunes each (a ballad, and something other than a ballad). Following each tune, Charlap and Rosenthal offered cogent commentary. There were a few instances when the playing was on such a super-high level that Bill and Ted were hard pressed to offer any comment.
If the talent shown by Michael Cabe, Gordon Webster, Miro Sprague and Fabian Almazon is an indicator of who’s going to handle jazz piano playing after you and I depart this orb, things will be in good hands. Cabe looked to be thirty-something; he could have been a bit younger. The youngest was Miro Sprague, 16. As I wrote Bill and Ted this morning, these two gave me the biggest thrills (not that the others were chopped liver by any means!) Cabe opened with a version of “Be My Love” that simply dripped with inner voices and passing tones. It would have been hard to improve this performance – but possibly taking it into tempo after a chorus or two of rubato might have done the trick, and both Bill and Ted pointed this out in their comments.
Miro Sprague – remember that name! – opened his pair with “All Blues.” The best way to describe what he did on the tune would be to paraphrase Charlap’s comments: “You took a tune that had been owned by Miles Davis ever since the Kind of Blue LP, and made it your own – and that is a very hard things to do.”
I was seated 4-5 feet from the top end of Miro’s keyboard and I kept staring at his hands. I had never seen such long, slender, elegant fingers. They just seemed to go on and on . . .
I hope the master class format continues to be a part of the annual Jazz in July event. Oh – one final note about the material played: a significant item on the c.v. of both Charlap and Rosenthal is the fact that they each were a part of Gerry Mulligan’s band. Fittingly, they bookended last evening’s proceedings with two Mulligan compositions: they opened with “Curtains” and closed with “Rocker.” “Rocker” is the better known of the two. I won’t even try to describe “Curtains”; it is so loaded with deep and melodic subtlety, I don’t think I could do it justice.

“Rocker” was at first called “Rock Salt” when Mulligan wrote it for a Charlie Parker date with strings in the early 1950s. There are two classic recordings of it, in Mulligan’s arrangement for the last Miles Davis Birth of the Cool session and with Mulligan’s own Tentet. “Curtains” is on the Midas Touch CD by Mulligan’s quartet with Rosenthal on piano. It is from a concert in Berlin in 1995, eight months before Mulligan died.
The only information I could find on the web about Michael Cabe, aside from scattered references, was this paragraph from a 2002 Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Obviously, he has moved on since then.

Michael Cabe is a 23-year-old jazz pianist/composer who has been active on the Seattle scene for several years. Cabe is a member of the Glynn Brothers Quartet, performs with the Seattle repertory Jazz Orchestra, appears as a solo pianist in many venues, and leads his own Michael Cabe Trio. He has worked with many of Seattle’s top jazz musicians including bebop saxophonist Don Lanphere, multi-instrumentalist Jay Thomas, and one of Seattle’s favorite vocalists Becca Duran. A winner of many musical awards and scholarships in the greater-Northwest region, including the 1997 Bellevue Jazz Festival Award for Outstanding Soloist, and runner-up at the 2002 Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, Cabe continues to forge a successful musical career. Cabe grew up in Monroe, Washington, attended Mt. Hood Community College in Portland Oregon, and will complete his jazz studies degree in 2002 at the University of Washington, where he studies with Marc Seales.

The eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote a letter to The New York Times that touches on the subject of a recent Rifftides posting. Here is the final paragraph:

The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to, susceptible to, the sound patterns of speech and music, but it is only with music, curiously, that we can be so readily overloaded – we see this, in a minor way, with catchy tunes. And I am inclined to agree with Dr. Victor Aziz that such hallucinations may well become more common as we are all constantly bombarded with music, whether we desire it, attend to it, are conscious of it or not.

Dr. Sacks’s entire letter is here. The article to which it refers, “Neuron Network Goes Awry, And Brain Becomes an IPod,” is here, but because it is older than a week, it will cost you $3.95. Sorry; it’s not MY policy.

I will be blogging lightly today. This may be all there is until tomorrow, unless inspiration or necessity convince me to break away from the deadline article that I’m writing for even more pay than I get from Rifftides.
The Rifftides staff has added a new blog to the Other Places list in the right-hand column. It is the site operated by Joe Moore of KFSR-FM in Fresno. He deals in news about jazz, which lately includes a discouraging number of obituaries. For the most part, his blog is a collection point for articles from all over, but now and then he doesn’t mind giving his opinion. This is the one that made me think his Jazzportraits is a blog worth keeping an eye on. It concerns a track on an album by the singer Mary Stallings with pianist Gerri Allen and drummer Billy Hart, among others.

Someone, (please raise your hand) decided it would be a good idea for Mary to record a cover of Nashville pop diva Shania Twain’s chart topping hit “Still the One” (not the song by the band Orleans of the same name, which would have been a better choice).
Like a car wreck that’s so horrible you can’t take your eyes off of it, after sitting slack jawed through the first listen through this track, I had to click repeat and hear it about 10 more times. The tune is performed slower than the original, in a quasi swing Billy Hart beat that he’s used quite often on Geri’s records before. Geri’s reharmonized the tune with her typical minimalist approach, and then had the (?)inspired(?) idea to overdub this dissonant synth organ part behind Mary’s vocals, almost an alien pedal point (the chord does change a few times, but you get the idea). The melody of the tune does NOT lend it to a swing beat, especially the B section (the hook). Mary, who is a true pro, tries to make the best of it, but it’s a flat out disaster, and I’m actually shocked it made the record. Simply horrible.

That seems to indicate that Moore listens closely, knows what he’s hearing, and is not reluctant to be blunt. Bluntness is not epidemic in jazz radio. To read the whole review, go here.

Annie Kuebler, the Mary Lou Williams archivist at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, gives us further insights into “Rifftide.” That is the 1945 Coleman Hawkins recording that inspired the name of this blog. She does not say that Hawkins stole the tune from Williams, only that it is likely to have been lodged in his mind when he played on a little-known record date with Mary Lou a couple of months before his own session. In the mid-forties, Hawkins and Williams were major swing era musicians encouraging and aiding the younger players who were developing bebop. Hawkins gave Thelonious Monk one of his most important early jobs as a pianist. Wiliams had a profound influence on the new music’s pianists. She told Ira Gitler in an interview for his book Swing To Bop, “We were inseparable, Monk, Bud Powell and I. We were always together every day, for a long time.”
Here is the note Ms. Kuebler sent us about “Rifftide.”

On December 15, 1944, Moe Asch recorded six cuts titled Mary Lou Williams and Her Orchestra in New York City. Williams’s arrangement of “[Oh] Lady Be Good” is nearly identical to Hawkins’s “Rifftide”—and one doesn’t need a musicologist to explain it. It just takes a listen. The only real difference is the breaks to accommodate the various musicians.
Originally recorded on 78 rpm Asch 552-3 as a three record set, the recording is now available on CD on the Chronological Classics Series # 1021, Mary Lou Williams 1944 -1945. The personnel for four of the cuts is Hawkins – tenor sax; Joe Evans – alto; Claude Green – clarinet; Bill Coleman – trumpet; Eddie Robinson – bass; Denzil Best – drums; and, of course, Williams on piano.
Obviously, this recording precedes “Rifftide,” attributed to Hawkins, from Hollywood Stampede on February 23, 1945. I don’t believe enough time had passed that Hawkins forgot the source, but that’s an opinion. Since my music manuscript archivist career began with Duke Ellington’s Collection, I am not judgmental about these things — just like to lay the facts out. In such matters, I am always reminded of Juan Tizol’s reply when asked if Ellington stole songs, “Oh, he stole. He’d steal it from his own self.”
Hope this helps. Thank for naming your website after a great underrated artist’s arrangement.

Before she joined the Institute for Jazz Studies five years ago, Annie Kuebler spent twelve years at the Smithsonian Institution. There, among many other achievements, she accomplished the massive task of organizing the manuscripts in the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington collection. Her contributions to preserving large segments of American art and culture are invaluable. Thanks, Annie