Duke Ellington was a wicked genius; a sound poet.
I can see him in my mind, seated behind his piano, sharing the bench with Strayhorn, tapping out melodies and smiling at Billy when it sounds right.
(“This is what ‘Buber’* will play on the trumpet,” he might have said.)
Smooth and easy, the Orchestra had the power (motivated by Duke and Strayhorn) to soothe the listener into a light, swingy dream; only to turn the world upside down with some strange twist from Duke's mind's ear.
This was not your father’s Big Band...
The Orchestra undulates through the speakers, like a living, breathing organism speaking in the easily decipherable language of blasts and burps from the horns—a twisted, surrealistic vision of the bustling night-life of the Jazz Age; at once beautiful and terrifying, beatific and stained, lovingly sweet and bitingly angry.
“Black and Tan Fantasy” wraps itself around my head, pours into my pores, immerses me in Duke’s groovy, ethereal world; glimpses of the music pass through my mind as it bops and swings—the world becomes the melody, the melody becomes the world, the melody is the world, no other world but the melody...
A rainy night
A Harlem shuffle down the side streets
Is that cat looking at me?
A neon sign shines back from the puddles
“Live Jazz”
Turned upside down
Flashing in a syncopated off time step with the music
That comes floating out of an open door
The trumpets make an all out assault on the senses
To the backdrop of the percussive saxes
(Something only Duke’s Orchestra got completely right)
Pounding the chest
Penetrating the skull
And tickling the mind
Can you hear the trumpets talking?
Listen to that swing!!!
A song played blue, with overtones of brown,
And the rain falls in a mist on the ground in my mind as I stand in this imagined street, diggin’ Duke’s blues.
No world but the melody, no melody but the world...
Dig!
Blow, man, blow!
peace, wayf
(*"Buber" Miley was a trumpet player in Duke Ellington's Orchestra who was often spotlighted as a soloist.)
