Duke Ellington Live (DVD)
November 16, 1973
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium
EuroArts Music International, 2019
53 minutes
It’s bittersweet to watch things nearing an end. In March 1974 Ellington would leave the road and check into Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he would die in May. Other musicians from this performance who would be gone in 1974: Joe Benjamin (January), Paul Gonsalves (May), and Harry Carney (October). It was the preternaturally young-looking Carney (nickname “Youth”) who after Ellington’s death famously said, “Without Duke, I have nothing to live for.”
Almost everything here feels perfunctory, with the band playing a short set in a European concert-hall version of a Newport festival. Instrumental solos are minimal; the musician most heard from is Anita Moore, singing “New York, New York” and “Somebody Cares” and scatting in “Blem.” She arrives on stage on the arm of a tardy Paul Gonsalves, whose contributes no solos beyond an off-mic obbligato. Some awkward stagecraft has Ellington introducing the “three bearded ’bones” and asking Harold Minerve to take repeated bows, after which Minerve venerates Ellington with embarrassing jungle-speak. What was that about?
But there are at least four bright moments: the somber piano solo “Metcuria” (unlisted on the DVD package, and marred by audience chatter and shushing through the first few bars, all of it loud enough to distract the pianist), Harold Ashby’s tenor solo on “Chinoiserie” (Ashby was the last great solo voice to join the band), and brief solos by guests Raymond Fol and Claude Bolling on “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Fol makes use of lush Strayhorn ballad harmonies; Bolling begins with a witty collage of Ellington pianisms. My favorite moment in this performance: Ellington and company digging the guests, and Gonsalves laughing so hard at Bolling’s virtuosity that he fails to come in with the rest of the band.
Audio and video quality are exceptional — with many closeups. You can even see the package of reeds behind Russell Procope’s chair.
The program:
C Jam Blues : Take the “A” Train : Creole Love Call : Caravan : In Duplicate : New York, New York : Blem : Chinoiserie : Metcuria : Medley: Don’t Get Around Much Anymore / Mood Indigo / I’m Beginning to See the Light / Sophisticated Lady : Somebody Cares : Take the “A” Train
The musicians:
Johnny Coles, Barry Lee Hall, Money Johnson, Mercer Ellington, trumpets
Art Baron, Chuck Connors, Vince Prudente, trombones
Harold Ashby, Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, Percy Marion, Harold Minerve, Russell Procope, reeds
Duke Ellington piano; Joe Benjamin, bass; Rocky White, drums
Anita Moore, Tony Watkins, vocals
Claude Bolling, Raymond Fol, piano
Related reading
All OCA Duke Ellington posts (Pinboard)
Friday, May 10, 2019
Duke Ellington Live, a review
Zippy’s Tad’s
[“Red Meat.” Zippy, May 10, 2019.]
There is but one Tad’s Steaks left in Manhattan. The address is 761 7th Avenue, though the restaurant is on 50th Street, flanked by a Tim Horton’s and Bobby Van's Grill. If Zippy is at the Times Square Tad’s, it really must be 1962 all over again.
Here’s an article on the history of Tad’s Steaks, once a coast-to-coast chain. (Remember “coast-to-coast”?) The Yelp reviews for the remaining Tad’s are interesting. “This is the absolute best steak in the city”: well, okay.
Years ago I would have said to Elaine, We have to go there. Today I would say, No, we don’t.
[From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). Click for a larger view.]
Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
More from Hart’s Guide
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Chris Albertson (1931–2019)
The writer, producer, and Bessie Smith biographer Chris Albertson has died at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times has an obituary.
Chris was a generous person in the world of music. His blog Stomp Off! (still online) offered remarkable stuff from his archives: interviews with Bessie Smith’s niece Ruby Walker, recordings of the Duke Ellington band at a benefit concert hosted by Jackie Robinson, a Charles Mingus television appearance. (Alas, some of the audio and video files appear long gone.) I read everything, linked to a number of posts, commented on occasion, and am now surprised to see that Orange Crate Art appears in a Stomp Off! list of “cyber stops.” I wish I’d known so that I could have said thanks.
Thank you, Chris Albertson, for all your contributions to music.
“The Sudden Departure”
“When a small town loses 100 people in just a few hours, kids come home to find their parents missing”: “The Sudden Departure,” reported by Lilly Sullivan, is a story from the April 19 episode of This American Life.
The situation
From “Viktor Orbán’s War on Intellect,” by Franklin Foer, in the June Atlantic. David Cornstein, a longtime friend of Donald Trump, is the United States ambassador to Hungary:
When I asked Cornstein about Orbán’s description of his own government as an “illiberal democracy,” the ambassador shifted forward and rested his elbows on a table. “It’s a question of a personal view, or what the American people, or the president of the United States, think of illiberal democracy, and what its definition is.” As he danced around the question, never quite arriving at an opinion, he added,
“I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has, but he doesn’t.”
A lost work by Raymond Roussel
Raymond Roussel had confidence. From David Wallace’s review of Roussel’s The Alley of Fireflies, a long-lost unfinished novel, now available in English, translated by Mark Ford:
Suddenly, he was overcome by a realization that he was a great genius. “I was the equal of Dante and Shakespeare,” he told his psychologist. “I felt glory.”I’ve begun reading The Alley of Fireflies and just hit the little statue filled with frozen wine. What the review doesn’t mention is that the mold for the statue is three centimeters tall and takes the form of Voltaire’s Pangloss dressed as Ceres.
Perfect Sluggo
[“Don’t Mess with Ernie.” Zippy, May 9, 2019.]
Yes, Sluggo is saying that he’s perfect. And that Zippy’s lines and circles are “irregular and messy.” And: “In a fight between messy & perfect, Sluggo always kills Zippy!” See also this 2012 panel: “Nancy plus Sluggo equals perfection.”
Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)
[Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy rune six days a week; Bill Griffith’s Zippy, seven.]
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
From “Stalin as Linguist — II”
In 1985, the poet Tom Clark wrote an essay titled “Stalin as Linguist” for the publication Poetry Flash. The essay, about (so-called) language poetry, was thoroughly negative. And it paid particular attention to the work of Barrett Watten. In a follow-up essay, Clark wrote about Watten’s response:
Watten reacted by composing a two-page, single-spaced, indignant, “not-for-publication” communiqué to Poetry Flash. The letter demanded redress of grievances and threatened a boycott by advertisers. Attached was a list of people to receive copies. The list was almost as long as the letter itself. It contained the names of language school sympathizers with influential positions — institutional poetry administrators, reading coordinators, publishers, book distributors, bookstore owners and employees, university teachers, gallery representatives, etc. From these people and from others in the language school’s local rank and file, Poetry Flash received a flood of letters. A selection appeared in subsequent issues of the paper. Several correspondents, such as Robert Gluck of the San Francisco State Poetry Center, charged me with “red-baiting.” Joe McCarthy was evoked more than once, as were the “mau-maus” (by [Ron] Silliman, though that letter never made it to print).I doubt that 1980s Poetry Wars will be of immediate interest to many OCA readers. I’m sharing this passage as one more bit of the Barrett Watten story, a bit perhaps unknown to present-day faculty and students at Wayne State University, where Watten has filed complaints against two students who have filed complaints against him. The Poetry Flash incident suggests a pattern of retaliation against perceived enemies that goes far back.
All of this suggests that despite its dedication to the ideal of criticism as equal in importance to creative work, the language school has a very thin skin when it comes to taking criticism.
Tom Clark, “Stalin as Linguist — II.” First published in Partisan Review (1987). In The Poetry Beat: Reviewing the Eighties. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
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May 15: One of the students has been cleared. And, she says, students have been told to keep mum about Barrett Watten.
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May 30: The story has made it to The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s behind the paywall, but this link appears to work, at least for now: “‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.” An excerpt:
For decades, faculty members in the English department at Wayne State University knew Barrett Watten had a temper. A tenured professor who specializes in the language school of poetry, Watten is an intense figure with a brooding passion for his work. Standing at over six feet tall, he also possesses an air of natural authority — in classrooms, committee meetings, and personal interactions. When that authority is seemingly questioned, according to current and former colleagues, Watten snaps.The Chronicle reports that eighteen of Watten’s colleagues in the English department have asked that his graduate faculty status be revoked and that his office be relocated outside the department.
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June 5: Wayne State’s Graduate Employees Organizing Committee has issued a statement about the university’s investigation.
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November 26: Barrett Watten has been removed from teaching and advising at Wayne State.
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December 11: The Chronicle of Higher Education has more. My favorite bit:
Colleagues previously told The Chronicle that [Watten] was known to launch into profanity-laced tirades that were made all the more ominous by his imposing physical stature. Watten sees such critiques as rooted in a misunderstanding of his approach to his discipline. “I teach the avant-garde, and am challenging in class. All supposedly good things,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle.Related reading
Barrett Watten Records (Accounts from students, colleagues, poets, scholars)
[The title “Stalin as Linguist” is a phrase borrowed from Watten’s book-length poem Progress.]
Writing at the British Library
An exhibition from the British Library: Writing: Making Your Mark. Scroll all the way down and you’ll see links to four online features, which in turn have links to seven more features.
And: the BBC draws on the exhibit to tell the story of handwriting in twelve objects.
