There is one performance from the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956 that overshadows the rest, making the cream of the bop crop sound, literally, overblown. New England’s annual sit down affair has produced many recordings that have secured their shelf space, but the reissue of Duke’s is a compulsory purchase.
Towards midnight on the last evening of the festival, a veteran jazzman and his band was to answer critics and fans alike who had written him off as old-fashioned, passé… square. Ellington was old in ’56, older than old; his band predated the swing era, but his was the only big band still together, touring regularly and holding residence at Carnegie Hall despite the ever dwindling audiences. It was this tireless commitment to his art that allowed him to play the graceful veteran, able to teach you a thing or two at Newport ‘56. He had what the bopheads didn’t; swing and lots of it.
Paul Gonsalves 27 chorus ‘solo’ is the manifesto for Ellington’s answer to hard bop’s finger work; outstanding virtuosity of course, but always backed by the Maestro’s piano and the rhythm of Sam Woodyard’s drums.
The famous blonde who gets to her feet to salute the saxophonist whips the band and the crowd into a frenzy. From the wings, the organisers repeatedly asked Duke to cut short the performance of “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue”, fearing a stampede. But the crowd was ripe and Duke refused to stop, showing his true talent as a bandleader, satisfying the beatniks and journos alike.
Eleventh hour performances such as these are often written into music mythology, but Duke’s was the archetype. Newport ‘56 would predate the screaming groupies of that decade, and would anticipate the late night fever of Woodstock in the next.
However, for years Ellington at Newport was a fraud, as both the band and the label Columbia were content to release a studio album recorded the day after the festival and palm it off as live with canned applause. “Complete” confesses these sins and pays penance for them, presenting the old takes (cleaned of canned effects) as well as the mono recording originally deemed inadequate for release, but expertly remastered.
Play with the balance dial and you get an echoey atmosphere on the left channel taken from a once lost “America’s Voice” recording, and on the right the original Columbia recording. These two mono tracks become balanced stereo that is the legendary performance at its best. For the true audiophile, the extensive notes tell the story of the engineers that painstakingly brought the LP to fruition.
Doug Groothuis
Dezember 22, 2011
Johnny Hodges did not play drums, but alto saxophone! In fact, at this concert, Duke says, “If you have heard of the saxophone, you have heard of Johnny Hodges.”