JLCO Celebrates Ellington Anniversary

courtesy of Jazz at Lincoln Center

At the beginning of this month, Blue Engine Records released another album of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), led by Wynton Marsalis, following up on the release of The Music of Wayne Shorter this past January. The title of the album is Black, Brown and Beige, and it is devoted entirely to the three-movement suite of the same name by Duke Ellington. Ellington and his orchestra first performed this composition at Carnegie Hall on January 23, 1943. The recording is based on a live performance given by JLCO in 2018, making it a 75th anniversary celebration of that premiere.

Those following the above hyperlink will see that it leads to the Amazon.com Web page for an MP3 album download. After a fair amount of searching, I could not find a distribution source for a physical copy of the album. Furthermore, the Amazon.com download does not include the accompanying booklet. The good news is that the Jazz at Lincoln Center Shop also has a Web page for the album, and that Web page includes a hyperlink to the booklet that does not require purchase of the album.

My own history with Black, Brown and Beige goes back a little less than a quarter century. I had moved to Palo Alto in August of 1995, and it did not take me long to learn that Stanford University hosted a jazz festival during the summer. One of the first concerts I attended was led by Louie Bellson and was a reconstruction of Black, Brown and Beige in its entirety, presumably a performance based on the 1994 recording that Belson had made for Musicmasters. Not long thereafter I added the complete set of CDs released by Prestige Records with the recordings made in Carnegie Hall (with a few exceptions) at the concerts given in January of 1943, December of 1944, January of 1946, and December of 1947.

Each of the suite’s three movements consists of three pieces. At Carnegie Hall Ellington provided verbal introductions for each of those movements, and those were included on the Prestige recording. If I am not mistaken, Bellson took the same approach in presenting the suite at Stanford.

Where the performance of jazz in concerned, the concept of an Urtext is somewhat oxymoronic. As a result, it was a bit difficult to pin down what charts were used by JLCO during the concert from which this recording was taken. Ellington secured international copyright for his score in 1946. However, it was not until 2017 that the Jazz Lines Foundation supported the preparation of this music for publication by Dylan Canterbury, Rob Duboff, and Jeffrey Sultanof. All three of these editors are credited in the album booklet, along with Chris Crenshaw, who was responsible for the transcription of the edition that they compiled and who conducted the performance itself.

For those that like details, the sources used to compile this publication were the following (as quoted from the notes included with the publication itself): “Ellington’s original 1942 score, the 1943 Carnegie Hall recording, an incomplete set of original 1943 parts, assorted re-copied parts from the 1940s, an incomplete 1958 set of parts, and a 1963 published score edited by Mercer Ellington and Tom Whaley and copied by Joe Benjamin.” As might be guessed, there were any number of inconsistencies across so many sources. As a result, the “gold standard” for the final publication amounted to fidelity to the recording of the Carnegie Hall performance.

All of that background leaves me with a somewhat mixed reaction to the JLCO recording. I am definitely glad that so much serious effort has gone into bringing this music to light again. Nevertheless, I am afraid that it will be almost impossible to wean me away from the Carnegie recording. This is not just because Ellington was the leader but also because of the many performers in the band who are now securely established in the jazz pantheon. These include trumpeters such as Ray Nance and Rex Stewart, trombonist Juan Tizol, and a reed section with the likes of Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, and Harry Carney. Obviously, Blue Engine has delivered a product with much better sound quality; but those that can listen through the engineering shortcomings that confronted Prestige are likely to find far more life in the “original version.”