• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: I’ve got a little list (II)

July 9, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Duke%2BEllington.jpgA week ago I posted a best-of-Ellington playlist of ten tracks that I created for Gotham Books to use in publicizing Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. At the same time, I came up with a second list of “deep tracks” intended for listeners who want to move beyond Ellington’s greatest hits. Here it is.
Once again, this list was an improvisation, and longtime buffs will doubtless already be familiar with all ten tracks. If, however, you’ve just started dipping your toe into the vast ocean of recorded Ellingtoniana, I guarantee that these performances will reveal aspects of the master that are new to you.
As before, the links will allow you to download the tracks in question.
* * *
Ten Duke Ellington tracks for the curious connoisseur:
• Creole Rhapsody (first version, 1931). Throughout his life Ellington grappled with the challenge of large-scale form. This was his first attempt, a Broadway-flavored musical potpourri whose title is a nod to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
• Rude Interlude (1933). Composed immediately after Ellington returned from his first visit to England, this strikingly modern-sounding miniature is a languorous nocturne whose slowly shifting harmonies hover in the air like low-lying clouds on a humid day
• Riding on a Blue Note (1938). An unpretentious medium-tempo riff tune in which Ellington takes the familiar musical formulas of the Swing Era and transfuses them with color and flair. Cootie Williams, the band’s longtime star trumpeter, takes the solo
• Chelsea Bridge (1941, composed by Billy Strayhorn). Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s longtime musical partner and collaborator, was fascinated by impressionist music and art, and this musical etching, inspired by a Whistler painting, fuses the diaphanous harmonies of Maurice Ravel with the danceable rhythms of jazz
• The Clothed Woman (1947). Ellington in an avant-garde mood–but scrape away the thick veneer of dissonant, hard-edged tone clusters and “The Clothed Woman” turns out to be an old-fashioned twelve-bar blues that gives way to a Harlem-style rent-party stomp
• Reflections in D (1953). Ellington rarely recorded as a pianist without his band, but this quiet musical miniature, an exquisite study in chromatic ornamentation, is one of his loveliest inspirations
Duke%2BEllington-1.jpg• Fleurette Africaine (1962, with Charles Mingus and Max Roach). An astringent minor-key trio ballad in which the old master teams up with two legendary modernists, proving that he could still teach the boppers a thing or two
• Afro-Bossa (1963). Ellington in a Latin-American mood. He called it “a kind of a gut-bucket bolero…executed in a pre-primitive manner” (Sam Woodyard plays the drum part not with sticks but with his bare hands)
• T.G.T.T. (1968, vocal by Alice Babs). A voice-and-electric-piano duet from the second of Ellington’s “sacred concerts.” The enigmatic title, he explained, “means Too Good to Title, because it violates conformity in the same way, we like to think, that Jesus Christ did. The phrases never end on the note you think they will”
• Blues for New Orleans (1970). A dirt-simple, heavy-on-the-backbeat piano-and-organ blues in which the band struts so soulfully that you’d think Ray Charles had stopped by the studio to sing a couple of choruses

Filed Under: main

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

July 2013
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Jun   Aug »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in