Swinging

I know there's that saying about writing about music being like dancing about architecture - well, something like that anyway - but I'm one of those people whose listening is greatly enhanced, sometimes transformed, by reading about what I'm listening to. One of my favourite DC sets, the 3 CD Duke Ellington: The Blanton-Webster Band (a definite choice for my appearance on Desert Island Disks) owes its pride of place at least partly to the wonderful notes in the accompanying booklet by Mark Tucker. He devotes space to comments on every track, 66 in total, along with a useful breakdown of the order of the soloists. The comments are always informative and though opinionated he listens so well I find myself nearly always in agreement.

The CDs featured heavily in our recent sojourn in KL, the first time I've played them on the system there. Considering the material was originally recorded between 1940 - 42 (the notes give the recording dates for every track) it sounds extraordinarily fresh and clear on these digital re-masters. Blanton's bass comes through clearly on almost all the tracks on which he plays and it's really only the drum sound that seems to get lost in the mix, though you get enough to understand what Sonny Greer brought to this fabulous band. What must it have been like to hear them play live!?!

One of the many astonishing things about Ellington was his ability to hold together a gathering of such talented yet disparate individuals for so long, using them almost as an instrument of composition in themselves, and making all this sound perfectly right, perfectly as it should be. Just one of the many fascinating features of the period is that it saw the incorporation of Billy Strayhorn into the ranks of the band as arranger/composer/occasional performer - in fact, as part of the fabric of Ellington himself: my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head and his in mine. The first recording of Take The 'A' Train (actually a Strayhorn composition, though it became, and remains, Ellington's signature piece) features on CD 2. You can hear the qualities that Strayhorn brought with him to the band and to Ellington's compositional process gradually assimilating themselves, and Strayhorn himself being assimilated into the material.

Priceless stuff - which has considerably lightened my load on what has essentially been a day of marking. But I really should have been dancing.