Download - Downbeat

BOOKSby John McDonoughHow EllingtonPersonifiedGrace UnderPressure atNewportA relatively new genre in seriousjazz literature is the albumbiography. Ashley Kahn’squests on the making of KindOf Blue and A Love Supremesealed their iconic status inhardcover eternity. But thereare not many albums so incontrovertibly immortal that they couldsustain such book-length micro-histories. In Backstory In Blue:Ellington At Newport ’56 (Rutgers University Press), John FassMorton has claimed one of the bellwether prizes. Duke Ellington’ssui generis turn at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival on“Diminuendo And Crescendo In Blue” was, in Morton’s words,“postwar pop culture’s first certified and recorded happening.”One difficulty in telling a small story casting a large shadow isbackground creep. Morton piles on a bit more than his mandaterequires. The book doesn’t arrive at the actual happening untilPage 101. But Morton ultimately delivers a gripping account of theriotous and dramatic night.The Ellington band was in decline, and he was unsure what thefuture held. Morton presents the Newport gig as a moment oftruth in which that future would be decided. Newport had becomethe epicenter of the jazz world, and the media was out in force tocover it. Time was looking for a peg for an Ellington cover story.Columbia was to record Newport, marking the band’s return towhat was the richest, most powerful promotional force in music.Ellington was worried that Saturday. He had prepared an originalwork in recognition of the evening’s importance, but it wasstill under-rehearsed and messy. Meanwhile, an overbooked lineupof musicians chewed up stage time and audience patience. Itwas 15 minutes before midnight when Ellington finally rallied hisweary men with a pep talk and led them to their date with fate.At that point, Morton’s book gets down to real business.Chapter 10 gives a detailed account of Ellington’s early set and theendless procession of players that followed. Chapter 11 retreatsfor a bio of hero-soloist Paul Gonsalves and a brief history of “D &C.” Chapter 12 goes through “Diminuendo” and into Gonsalves’early choruses, and Chapter 13 introduces readers to Morton’sother hero, or heroine, Elaine Anderson. With this book, she istransformed from an urban legend to a real person.Unfortunately, the LP of this landmark performance is out ofprint today. Morton might have probed a bit more deeply into thereissue purist Phil Schaap assembled in 1999. Declaring the original“phony” and a “subterfuge” because it mixed live performancewith studio remakes made to sound live, he combined theoriginal Columbia mono tape with a version recorded simultaneouslyby the Voice of America and produced a stereo master witha clearer rendering of the Gonsalves solo.If you want to understand why Backstory In Blue was written inthe first place, listen to George Avakian’s original mono LP for thetorrent and the spectacle. Then go to Schaap’s CD for the musicaldetail. Then read the book.DBOrdering info: rutgerspress.rutgers.eduNovember 2008 DOWNBEAT 87