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Ellington's expressive fingers
The Duke Ellington Collection
EMI/Virgin Records, Rs. 225 (CD)
What verdict can one deliver on a Duke Ellington album — one that costs a trifle for 18 tracks and 74 minutes of music — but "Go for it!"? Could there possibly be a caveat? Well, yes, there could when one finds that all tracks except one are taken from five albums: "Ellington `55", "Live at the Blue Note", "Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington: The Complete Sessions", "Showcase Duke Ellington" (four tracks each), and "Money Jungle" (one track, "Solitude"). For 48 years, "Take the `A' Train" was the signature tune of the Voice of America's Jazz Hour, and was occasionally played out on the programme in full. It has to be the highlight of the album, with its delectable piano intro and brilliant trumpet solo set against an ensemble dominated by saxes. But it has to jostle for honours with the "... Blue Note" and "Ellington `55" tracks and "Solitude". Especially the latter , with its long solo piano section before Ellington is joined by Max Roach on drums and Charles Mingus on bass, in an astonishing display of the power of these three instruments, makes for sublime music. Nor can one forget "Perdido" from "... Blue Note", dominated by Clark Terry's trumpet solo, and, from "Ellington '55", Count Basie's signature tune "One O'Clock Jump", with its solos by piano, tenor saxophone, trombone and trumpet.
The tracks in "The Complete Sessions" have historic value, featuring Ellington's expressive piano with Armstrong's vocals and trumpet in the latter's All-Stars small group.
Ultimate Billie Holiday
Verve/Universal Music, Rs. 445 (CD)
For many fans, Billie Holiday has to be the greatest singer in jazz history, with her unrivalled ability to imbue ballads with emotion. As Shirley Horn, who selected these tracks, puts it, Holiday made any song she sang her own. Horn, who died recently was no mean singer of ballads. Against Holiday's emotional depth, however, I must set what I consider her tendency to exploit that depth with plaintiveness, occasionally descending to whining. It came out best - or rather worst - in what I call songs of victimhood or "doormatism'', an attribute that was uncommon in contemporary jazz, as distinct from pop, vocals. The only doormat song in this compilation is "My Man'', and by the time most of the songs here were recorded drug and alcohol abuse had given Holiday's voice a rasping quality that smothered much of the whining tone, if not the plaintiveness. But Holiday had by now become a star, dwarfing on most of these recordings the instrumentalists who accompanied her. She had always sung with genuine jazz bands, staying scrupulously clear of the pop orchestras some of her contemporaries occasionally fronted, and in the early days there had always been a balance between her voice and the instrumentalists, many of them stars and consummate soloists.
On most of the tracks on this collection, recorded as usual with great jazz instrumentalists such as Oscar Peterson, Benny Carter, Charlie Shavers and Harry Edison, they sound tantalisingly good but wasted in the background. "Lover Come back to Me'' and "Please Don't Talk about Me When I'm Gone'', both brisk-paced, are for me the pick of the album, which forces me to ask the question: is this jazz as I know it? As I say maybe not, I can hear the howls of protest from diehard Holidayphiles.
JAZZEBEL
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