Billy Strayhorn
Composer and arranger, 1939 to 1967. Take the “A” Train, Chelsea Bridge and Lush Life are his.
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Demo · Duke Ellington
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Programme Notes
A Few Words
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) was born in Washington, D.C., and learned his trade at the piano in its ragtime cafés. He came to New York in 1923 and, from 1927 to 1931, led the house band of the Cotton Club in Harlem, broadcast across America night after night.
He wrote for the players in front of him, not for a section: the growl of a trumpet, the silk of Johnny Hodges’s alto, Harry Carney’s baritone at the bottom of every chord. In 1939 Billy Strayhorn joined him, and for almost thirty years the two wrote as one; Strayhorn’s Take the “A” Train became the band’s signature.
At Carnegie Hall in 1943 he played Black, Brown and Beige, a history of Black America in music. At Newport in 1956 Paul Gonsalves blew twenty-seven choruses of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue and the crowd rose to its feet. Then came the suites, from Such Sweet Thunder to the Far East Suite, and from 1965 the Sacred Concerts, played in cathedrals.
He left more than a thousand compositions, and called his band his instrument. “There are simply two kinds of music,” he wrote in 1962, “good music and the other kind.”
Collaborations
Johnny Hodges
Alto saxophone, 1928 to 1970. He left to lead his own band from 1951 to 1955, then came back to the same chair.
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Harry Carney
Baritone saxophone, 1927 to 1974. He joined at seventeen, in Boston, and never played in another band.
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Ray Nance
Trumpet, violin and voice, 1940 to 1963. The only violin soloist the orchestra ever had.
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Sonny Greer
Drums, 1923 to 1951. He came up from Washington with him: the band’s first drummer, behind a kit built like a stage set.
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Bigard, Webster, Hardwick, Stewart, Jones
Clarinet, tenor, alto, cornet and trumpet, 1940 to 1942. The band of the early forties; he wrote for each of them by name.
Read more (Bigard, Webster, Hardwick, Stewart, Jones)
Snapshots
At the Howard Theater, Washington, around June 1946. William P. Gottlieb The orchestra at the Aquarium, New York, November 1946. William P. Gottlieb In concert at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, March 1961. Nationaal Archief A night-club map of Harlem, 1932, with the Cotton Club. E. Simms Campbell, Library of Congress With Django Reinhardt, on his tour with the band, New York, 1946. William P. Gottlieb Arriving at Schiphol for concerts in The Hague and Amsterdam, February 1963. Nationaal Archief With Kay Davis, the band’s singer, on tour in the Netherlands, April 1950. Nationaal Archief