Call me provincial, but hearing Duke Ellington announce, “Harry Carney has come all the way from Boston, Massachusetts to lead us now into ‘Jam With Sam’,” and his closing allusion to the Summer White House on Cape Cod, “That was a high C above Hyannisport,” makes this one of my all-time favorite Ellington moments. It was February 1963, France’s adoration of Jackie and JFK was in full fervor, and Duke was making connections to Camelot as he ran down the names of his revered band members at the Olympia Theater in Paris.
France’s love affair with Ellington preceded his first visit in 1933 and lasted through many subsequent appearances. In 1973, he became the first jazz musician to be named a knight of the French Legion of Honor. (Miles Davis was knighted in 1991.) As Ellington chronicler Stanley Dance noted, “His charm and courtesy have even enabled him to escape most of the acrimony of French jazz politics.” Dance was primarily referring to Hughes Panassie and Charles Delauney, co-founders of the Hot Club of France. They were co-editors of one of the first jazz periodicals, Le Jazz Hot, and among the great recordings they produced was a 1939 session pairing Django Reinhardt with the Ellingtonians Rex Stewart, Barney Bigard, and Billy Taylor. But they had a falling out over bebop: Delauney embraced it, Panassie despised it, and they never spoke again. Dance notes that they were always in the house for Ellington’s local concerts and that Duke “acknowledges Panassie’s requests” and “Delauney is always referred to with gratitude for having provided the opportunity to record with the Paris Opera Orchestra.”
The title of Panassie’s second book, The Real Jazz, underscored the passionate and proprietary feelings that Parisians tended to harbor for the music. His first, 1934’s Hot Jazz, laid down the gauntlet on it opening page: “It is too bad that in all these years no one has bothered to find out what laws jazz obeys.” Panassie took it upon himself to fill that void. And reflecting back on the Hot Club’s enduring influence, Dance wrote, “The critical climate [is] partly responsible for the Paris audience’s becoming one of the most discriminating and demanding in the world.” Ellington knew Paris well enough to observe that it had “changed after the war,” but who knows if what he was really alluding to was the strange divide between the men who’d brought Django and Stephane Grappelli together in 1934?
Ellington died 42 years ago on Friday, May 24, 1974. He’d been ill with cancer for awhile and The Times had taken notice of the sidelined Ellington in a couple of articles, so there was more sadness than surprise over the news. Nonetheless, it was an enormous loss, as Duke was both a tradition unto himself and the most galvanizing leader of an idiom that was beginning to splinter. How ironic it was that Miles Davis, whose forays into jazz-rock fusion were then the most disruptive to jazz’s sense of historical continuity, had declared, “At least one day out of the year all musicians should just put their instruments down and give thanks too Duke Ellington.” My expression of gratitude for the man who’d become my personal hero came in the form of a Memorial Day weekend spent listening round-the-clock to the stack of Ellington records I’d bought over the preceding five years, connecting with the small circle of Ellington fans I knew around town, and watching the documentary On the Road With Duke Ellington, which WGBH/Channel 2 broadcast that weekend and the following Saturday as well.
The Great Paris Concert is one of Ellington’s greatest concert albums. It’s not as famous as Ellington at Newport ’56, nor as historic as the Carnegie Hall Concerts that Duke presented between 1943 and ’48. But it’s the most representative of what it was like to hear the Ellington Orchestra in person. As the Penguin Guide to Jazz noted, it’s a concert recording distinguished “not so much in the solos as in the ensembles, which are rousing to an almost unprecedented degree.”
The album was originally released as a two-LP set that drew on three nights from Duke’s extended stay at the Olympia. Its expansiveness allowed for the inclusion of two extended works, “A Tone Parallel to Harlem,” and “Suite Thursday.” The former, a kaleidoscopic panorama of Harlem’s sights and sounds, was commissioned by Arturo Toscanini for the NBC Symphony. Ellington composed it while sailing from Le Havre to New York aboard the Ile de France. He first recorded it in 1952 on his second long-playing album, Ellington Uptown. “Suite Thursday” was composed by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn; inspired by John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row novel Sweet Thursday, it was commissioned by the Monterey Jazz Festival and premiered in 1960.
“Harlem” eclipses “Black, Brown, and Beige” as the most prominent of Duke’s works currently in the repertoires of symphony orchestras. I heard an impressive performance of it by the Springfield Symphony Orchestra several years ago with Marcus Roberts as guest pianist. Trumpeter Ray Nance intones “Har-lem” to begin the work in Paris.
Ellington concerts weren’t complete without a Johnny Hodges showcase, and in Paris it consisted of three tunes, “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” and “All of Me.” The triptych shows off Hodges’s instrumental command and tonal versatility on tunes whose emotional range runs from sassy to heartrending to insouciant. It was long said that Ellington was the envy of every other bandleader because he got to introduce Johnny Hodges every night. Here’s a prime example of what that meant.