November 11, 1947: Duke Ellingtons orchestra recorded Billy Strayhorns Progressive Gavotte. Ellington and Strayhorn aspired to be accepted as composers and performers ofserious music, in the tradition of classical European composers. Ellingtons first longer recording was of his composition Creole Rhapsody. It was 8 1/2 minutes long and took up two sides of a 78 r.p.m. record. In the mid-1930s Ellington wrote the score for a nine-minute musical film, Symphony in Black (1935), which featured a young Billie Holiday and foreshadowed Black, Brown, and Beige. In 1943 Ellington and his orchestra performed at New Yorks Carnegie Hall. The program included a 44-minute version Black, Brown, and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro. The work did not fit the conventions of either jazz or classical music, and the response of music critics was so disappointing that Ellington never again performed the entire piece in public. Neither Ellington nor Strayhorn were dissuaded from creating other large-scale jazz suites, including the Liberian Suite (1947); Harlem (1951); the Festival Suite (1956); Such Sweet Thunder (1957), a musical tribute to Shakespeare; Suite Thursday ( 1960), which paid tribute to author John Steinbeck; and the Far East Suite (1966). This is from a Paris performance, where his longer works were better received than in the US,A tone parallel to Harlem. .youtu.be/Bb1CXh9uyWA
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 16:54:43 +0000
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