This week we consider Duke Ellington recorded on the road, and then visit Boston to check out emerging emcee Dutch ReBelle, and then jump over to Paris to experience jazz vocalist Elisabeth Kontomanou.
What becomes clear when you listen to a lot of Duke covering recordings from the late twenties on through the early seventies, what you hear is a constant development of the music in terms of ideas and inspirations. Ellington wrote for an orchestra made up of distinctive individuals. Ellington also wrote on commission, wrote for movies and theatre, for vaudeville and religious liturgy.
Also, you hear the arrangement of material change as the band members changed and as the times changed. Just in terms of longevity of the band as a whole, as well as longevity of the repertoire (both in terms of producing time, classic material, as well as in terms of producing quality compositions over a period of decades), the Duke Ellington orchestra is unparalleled in all of American history. In fact, I don’t think there is even an American classical orchestra that matches the Ellington aggregation in terms of standing within its genre. And certainly there is no American classical music composer who has achieved in classical music what Duke achieved in jazz.
—kalamu ya salaam