Down At Duke’s Place-With Duke Ellington In Mind

 

No, this will not be a screed about how back in the day I heard some guy, probably a sexy sax player, blow some high white note out against some bay, maybe Frisco Bay, and I was hooked, hooked for life on the be-bop jazz scene. Unlike rock and roll, the classic kind that was produced in my 1950s growing up time and which I have had a life-long devotion to or folk music which I came of age, political and social age to later in the early 1960s, jazz was a late, a very late acquisition to my understanding of the American songbook. Oh sure I would hear a phrase blowing out the window sitting in some bar over drinks with some hot date, maybe hear it as backdrop in some Harvard Square bookstore when I went looking for books (and, once somebody hipped me to the scene, looking for bright young women who also were in the bookstore looking for books, and bright young men but that scene is best left for another time), or at some party when the host tired of playing old-time folk music and decided to kick out the jams and let the jazz boys wreak their havoc. But jazz was, and to a great extent still is, a side bar of my musical tastes.          

About a decade ago, a little more, I got seriously into jazz for a while. The reason: the centennial of the birth of Duke Ellington when I was listening to some show which was commemorating that fact. The show played a lot of his stuff from the early 1940s when he had Ben Webster and Johnny Hodges on board. The stuff blew me away and as is my wont when I get my enthusiasms, when something blows me away, I grabbed everything by the Duke and his various groupings and marveled at how very good his work was, his tonal poems which reached deep, deep down. Especially when those saxs blew me away. Funny though I thought at the time that I hadn’t picked up on this sound before since there are very definitely elements of the blues in Brother Duke’s work. And I have been nothing but a stone blues freak since the early 1960s when I first heard Howlin’ Wolf hold forth practically eating that harmonica. Moreover I had always been a Billie Holiday fan although I never drew the connection to the jazz in the background since it usually was muted to let her rip with that throaty voice, the voice that chased the blues away.

So, yes, count me among the guys who are searching for the guys who are searching for the great big high white note, guys who have been searching for a long time as the notes waft out into the deep blue sea night. Count me too among Duke’s boys, down at Duke’s place where he eternally searched for that elusive high white note.