Ellington at Newport, 1956
Sounds like an interesting book:
Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport ’56
by John Fass Morton
A review by Stanley Crouch
Through our remarkable technology we witness the fundamental dilemma of our age, which is the use of machines that bespeak the genius of the species for the trivialization of the profound. We have thus become accustomed to a blizzard of fluff delivered by ingenious high-tech means. An aspect of this fluff is music polluted by its attachment to the cheap, demeaning imagery of videos or losing gravity while largely used as a background score for the activities of a distracted public. People are uncomfortable in silence because it can breed needless contemplation and may engender a floating into the deeper world of the self. In our moment of deracinated intimacy, too many of us have settled for a blob of backbeats and recording-studio tricks that do not swallow but melt away the great force of music in a perpetual submission to contrived novelty.
For all of the shortcomings imposed upon a Washington, D.C., Negro born in 1899, much more was possible for the young Duke Ellington than there would have been had he arrived in our time. To tell it as it actually was, the varieties of bigotry were where they should have been because heroes need huge obstacles to teach them what they must know in order to achieve the victories demanded of them. Ellington succeeded both in adapting to the new technology and in learning how to make recording equipment into his tool rather than a dehumanizing gimmick or even a technological special effect to which he and his artistic purposes could become secondary. The technology submitted to him, not he to it.
Considered from all sides, Ellington was not only the most impressive genius produced by jazz but perhaps the greatest of all twentieth-century artists, because he redefined and refined his idiom in a world far more complex and extreme, ranging from the violent to the sublime, than the worlds inhabited by such aesthetic peers as James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky. (In his memoir Music Is My Mistress, Ellington described being summoned more than a few times by the New York City police, taken to the morgue, and asked if he knew a murdered man last seen dancing to the jungle band at the Cotton Club. That he always denied knowing the corpse, even if he did, tells us that he knew a loose lip could sink your own ship.) Ellington produced a body of work so large that it still intimidates our most serious music scholars, and it looms even more imposingly because he best understood that his was an age in which the performing arts would be remade by technology. In Picasso, Gertrude Stein says that people do not ever really change; what changes is the way in which they see themselves. This applies perfectly to Ellington. As the summoning power of electrical enhancements and preservations of given moments evolved, Ellington deftly used them, with an authority that increased as he came to understand exactly where he was and what specific things made his time different from those of artists who had come before him and before the technology that was too massively influential to ignore.
Always a contemplative and secretive man, this musician had to learn on the wing because there were no predecessors who could provide models or give him advice…
