Duke Ellington

The debut Columbia album was an act of retrospection and expansion simultaneously: Ellington took four of his most famous compositions and performed them at lengths their original recordings had not permitted, stretching "Mood Indigo," "Sophisticated Lady," "Solitude," and "The Tattooed Bride" into extended statements that could accommodate the full development their melodic and harmonic content implied. The long-playing record had made this kind of extended performance possible, and Ellington seized the opportunity with the confidence of a composer who had always known his music was being compressed by the three-minute format.

Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone is the voice that most fully embodies the Ellington sound on this record. His tone, simultaneously sweet and sensuous, carrying a bluesy undertow beneath the sophisticated harmonic surface, is what made the Ellington orchestra sound unlike any other band in jazz. The extended format gives him room to develop his improvisations more fully than the short recordings ever allowed, and the results are extraordinary.

Masterpieces by Ellington announced that the LP era was going to be good for jazz composition, and it demonstrated how radically the extended format could transform familiar material. This was not just Ellington playing his hits longer; it was Ellington finally playing his hits at their proper length.

The second Columbia album is a more ambitious project than Masterpieces, combining shorter pieces with an extended suite that demonstrates the range of Ellington’s compositional thinking at the start of the decade. "A Tone Parallel to Harlem," known simply as the Harlem Suite, is a fourteen-minute portrait of the neighborhood that had been central to Ellington's career since the 1920s.

Clark Terry's arrival had brought a new voice to the trumpet section, his bright, slightly comic quality adding a dimension that balanced the more lyrical voices of Ray Nance and the power of Cat Anderson. Paul Gonsalves, whose importance to the orchestra would become enormous later in the decade, is already a significant presence, his tenor saxophone providing a different kind of warmth from Ben Webster's more full-bodied sound. The orchestra in 1951 was arguably the finest aggregation of individual talent Ellington had ever assembled.

Ellington Uptown demonstrated that the Columbia arrangement was going to give Ellington the latitude to pursue his most ambitious compositional projects, and the confidence and quality of this record set the tone for the extraordinary work that followed throughout the decade.

A period on Capitol Records produced a set of compact orchestral readings of popular standards rather than extended treatments of Ellington’s own material. Premiered by Ellington is a collection of shorter pieces that show a different side of Ellington's approach: the miniaturist working in tight forms rather than the extended canvas of the suites. Every one of the eight is a well-worn standard, so the album’s value is in what the orchestra does with familiar material rather than in any new Ellington writing.

The Capitol recordings have a slightly different sonic character from the Columbia sides, the sound brighter and more forward, which suits the ensemble's attack. With Johnny Hodges gone since 1951, the alto chair falls to Rick Henderson, whose playing is competent and occasionally inspired but inevitably measured against the irreplaceable voice it replaced. Clark Terry's trumpet playing adds a contemporary edge that prevents the music from settling too comfortably into established Ellington idiom.

Premiered by Ellington occupies an interesting place in the discography: not quite as immediately satisfying as the extended works on Columbia, but valuable for the window it provides into Ellington's process at the level of individual pieces rather than large-scale architecture.

The most dance-oriented of the Capitol albums, assembled specifically to capture the Ellington orchestra in its function as a dance band rather than a concert outfit. The framing is slightly reductive for music of this quality, but Dance to the Duke documents something important: the Ellington orchestra's ability to play music that was simultaneously the most sophisticated in jazz and genuinely danceable. The idea that swing and compositional complexity were in opposition was never true, and this record demolishes it.

The medium and uptempo material here has a propulsive quality that derives from the orchestra's rhythmic precision rather than from any simplification of the arrangements. The band swings because each section knows exactly where it sits in relation to every other section, the brass and reed writing interlocking with a precision built from years of playing together. Ray Nance's violin on the slower pieces adds a melodic dimension that few other jazz orchestras could have provided.

Dance to the Duke is not the place to start with Ellington's 1950s work, but for listeners already committed to the music it is a genuine pleasure, the orchestra at its most physically immediate and the soloists given opportunities to stretch that the more compositionally oriented albums occasionally sacrificed.

One of the last of the Capitol albums, with Ellington Showcase still to follow, it consolidates the material of the preceding two years into a solid summation of what Ellington and the orchestra achieved in that period. Ellington ’55 sets remakes of Ellington staples beside swing-era hits identified with other bands, "In the Mood", "One O’Clock Jump", "Stompin’ at the Savoy", "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Flying Home", and the overall impression is of a band that has reached a plateau of consistent excellence: not the most thrilling moment of the 1950s work but not a step below it either.

The album's particular strength is in the showcase pieces for individual soloists. Paul Gonsalves is increasingly prominent on this record, his tenor saxophone finding a settled relationship with the orchestra's overall sound that it had not quite achieved on the earlier Capitol sides. Russell Procope's clarinet and Rick Henderson's alto provide the reed section's character, though the absence of Hodges remains the single most audible gap in the ensemble. Clark Terry's contributions add the contemporary jazz feeling that kept the Ellington orchestra from sounding like a living museum.

Ellington '55 brings the Capitol period toward its close on a strong note. The return to Columbia that followed it would bring some of the most celebrated work of the entire Ellington career, including Ellington at Newport and the Shakespeare suite. But the Capitol years were not a creative backwater; they produced excellent music that deserves more attention than it typically receives.

The collaboration with Rosemary Clooney was an unlikely commercial pairing that turned out to be musically genuine. Clooney was one of the most popular singers in America in the mid-1950s, her appeal extending far beyond the jazz audience that Ellington usually addressed. What the collaboration discovered was that Clooney's vocal warmth and her natural feel for a lyric were entirely compatible with the Ellington sound, and that Ellington's orchestra provided a more interesting context for her voice than the standard pop orchestration she usually worked with.

The repertoire leans toward Ellington standards and popular songs of the period, all given the full Ellington orchestral treatment. Clooney sings the material with an ease that suggests she found the context liberating rather than challenging. Johnny Hodges behind her voice has the same effect it has on everyone who performs with the Ellington orchestra: it makes the music feel more emotionally serious without making it heavier.

Blue Rose is not the most essential Ellington record of the period, but it is a genuine artistic success that took both performers in directions their usual context did not permit.

Recorded for Bethlehem while Ellington was simultaneously working for Columbia, Historically Speaking takes Ellington's own history as its organizing principle, revisiting his earlier compositions, from 1920s pieces like East St. Louis Toodle-o and Creole Love Call through Jack the Bear and Ko-Ko, alongside Strayhorn pieces like Midriff and Upper Manhattan Medical Group. The result is a reminder of how much of jazz history Ellington had written himself.

The historical framing is not a constraint but a liberation: it gives Ellington license to deploy every element of the orchestra's range within a single program, from his 1920s pieces through the dense harmonic writing of his most complex compositions. The band plays all of it with equal authority, which is the point: the Ellington orchestra was the most historically comprehensive ensemble in jazz, its musical vocabulary spanning thirty years of the music's development.

Historically Speaking is underrated in the Ellington discography, partly because it sits outside the main Columbia narrative and partly because the concept sounds more pedagogical than it actually is. In practice, it is a consistently excellent record that showcases the full range of the orchestra's capabilities.

The second Bethlehem album takes a different approach from Historically Speaking, organizing itself around individual soloists rather than a conceptual framework. As the title implies, Ellington is presenting his musicians: giving each of the orchestra's most distinctive voices extended feature space within an orchestral context. This was always the Ellington approach at its most fundamental level, and Duke Ellington Presents makes the presentational mode explicit.

Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet gets some of his most prominent recording time of the period here, his cool, technically precise approach a deliberate contrast to the warmer saxophone voices that usually dominated. Paul Gonsalves's tenor features are increasingly assured, the instrument finding its proper weight in the ensemble balance. The Hodges features are, as always, the emotional center of the program, his alto saxophone transforming even relatively modest compositions into statements of lyric beauty.

Duke Ellington Presents is a good companion to Historically Speaking rather than a substitute for it: where the latter provides the historical and conceptual sweep, this one delivers the intimate portraits of the musicians who made the orchestra what it was.

The most famous concert in jazz history, and the record that saved Duke Ellington's career at a moment when it appeared to be drifting toward irrelevance. The Newport Jazz Festival of July 7, 1956, is remembered primarily for Paul Gonsalves's twenty-seven-chorus tenor saxophone solo on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," a performance that brought the outdoor crowd to its feet and onto the field, nearly stopping the festival and landing Ellington on the cover of Time magazine. But the full concert document is deeper than the Gonsalves moment alone suggests.

What happened during Gonsalves's solo was not just technical brilliance, though the playing was technically extraordinary, it was the generation of a collective energy in a large outdoor crowd that went beyond anything planned or rehearsed. Sam Woodyard on drums had been pushing the tempo from the start; Ellington at the piano was visibly encouraging Gonsalves to keep going; the crowd's response escalated with each successive chorus. It was jazz at its most directly, physically communal, though the recording captures it imperfectly: Gonsalves played into the wrong microphone and is often barely audible, and applause was dubbed on to cover the gap.

The rest of the album is excellent, including the Hodges feature "Jeep’s Blues" and the Newport Jazz Festival Suite, though both were re-recorded in the studio on July 9 rather than taken from the stage. But it is inevitably the Gonsalves performance that defines the record and the night. Ellington at Newport is where the 1950s resurgence became undeniable, and it remains one of the most electrifying live recordings in any genre of music.

Recorded for Columbia in 1956 and later staged for television on CBS's U.S. Steel Hour in May 1957, A Drum Is a Woman is an allegorical suite about the history of jazz told through the story of Madame Zajj, a mythological figure representing the drum. Ellington narrates, the orchestra plays, and vocalists contribute to the narrative. The concept is ambitious, and the music throughout is of high quality, but the narration and the allegorical framework occasionally make the album feel more like a presentation than an autonomous musical work.

The suite format here is less purely musical than the suites on Ellington Uptown or the subsequent Such Sweet Thunder: the narrative element creates constraints that the music sometimes chafes against. But there are moments of genuine orchestral beauty throughout, particularly in the sequences featuring Hodges, Harry Carney's baritone saxophone, and the always distinctive Clark Terry. The jazz history narrative is delivered with Ellington's characteristic wit and a certain amount of self-promotion that is entirely in character.

Ellington fans will want this record for the music and should approach the narrative framework with patient good humor. It is not one of the essential 1950s Ellington records, but it documents an aspect of his ambition that the purely orchestral albums cannot: his desire to combine jazz with other narrative and theatrical forms.

The Shakespeare suite is Ellington's greatest compositional achievement of the 1950s and one of the great works in the jazz orchestral canon. Written for the 1957 Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Ontario after the orchestra played there in August 1956, and premiered at Town Hall in New York on April 28, 1957, the twelve-movement suite takes Shakespearean characters as its subjects without being programmatic in any heavy-handed way: each piece captures something essential about its subject through musical means, the compositional intelligence doing the work rather than any literal illustration of the plays. Billy Strayhorn co-composed several movements, his contribution indistinguishable from Ellington's in quality if sometimes distinguishable in harmonic approach.

The suite demonstrates what the full Ellington orchestra could do when given material of this ambition. "The Star-Crossed Lovers" is one of the most beautiful things in the Ellington catalog. The album’s notes cast it as Hodges playing Juliet and Gonsalves Romeo, though on the record the solo space is Hodges’s alone, carrying a melodic tenderness that requires no program notes. "Madness in Great Ones" captures Hamlet's edge through increasingly unstable harmonic movement. "Half the Fun" sketches Cleopatra with a sensuous rhythm that is unmistakably Ellingtonian.

Such Sweet Thunder stands alongside Ellington at Newport as the defining achievement of the 1950s Columbia period. The Newport concert demonstrated what the orchestra could do in a live context under pressure; this suite demonstrates what it could do when given time, resources, and material equal to its ambitions. Both records are essential; this one is the deeper artistic statement.

The most purely beautiful record in the 1950s Ellington catalog, a collection of ballads and mood pieces played at a level of collective elegance that no other band in the world could have matched. Indigos was conceived as a late-night listening record, the programming built entirely around slow tempos and ballad treatment, the orchestra operating at a dynamic range well below its concert intensity. The result is the Ellington sound distilled to its most intimate essence: the voicings clear, the solos unhurried, the overall atmosphere one of contained perfection.

Johnny Hodges is the protagonist throughout, and this is arguably the finest showcase for his alto saxophone in the entire 1950s discography. On "Prelude to a Kiss" he plays with a concentration and a lyric depth that is simply beyond any other alto saxophonist of the era. Paul Gonsalves, Ray Nance, and Jimmy Hamilton each contribute features of comparable quality, but the record belongs to Hodges in the way that the instrument and the idiom seemed created specifically for each other.

Ellington Indigos closes this survey at a point of serene completeness. From the historical ambition of Masterpieces by Ellington through the Newport triumph and the Shakespearean suite to this still, beautiful record, the 1950s Ellington discography represents one of the great sustained creative periods in American music. Indigos is where the decade ends, and there is no better ending imaginable.