Album Reviews

I don’t know about you, but back in the winter of 1969, big band music was not exactly my “go to” musical genre. At 22 I was listening to Abbey Road which had just come out, and Tommy and Simon and Garfunkel and The Kinks, and Frank Zappa, not Duke Ellington, though I was into Monk, Coltrane, Miles and Cannonball. I drew the line at big band music.

I wasn’t even moved to give it a chance when Steely Dan did “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” on Pretzel Logic, which I loved, and I noticed that it was written by Duke Ellington.

So imagine the scene for this Ellington 70th birthday party concert recorded in 1969 in the grimy industrial town of Manchester, England, from where nine year later Factory Records and Joy Division would spring.

In the audience were probably mostly WWII veterans and their spouses gathering for a reunion to hear the pop music of their era, that had been supplanted by rock much like rap has done to rock over the past decade or two. Rock, invented in America and then embraced by the English who later returned the favor with the “English Invasion” of the mid sixties, was not on the mind of the Manchester crowd assembled to hear Duke Ellington.

By 1969 Duke and his sound had been marginalized by time. That he could afford to front a band of this stature in 1969 is testament to his accomplishments. Who else but Basie from the big band era could afford to tour with such a large assemblage?

Ellington, past his prime, was playing greatest hits (“Satin Doll,” Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train,” “Perdido” and the like), but the band was still made up of the greats: Hodges, Gonsalves, Carney, Cootie Williams, Cat Anderson and the others and they came to play as you’ll hear on this superbly performed and tastefully engineered live set captured by the legendary British recording engineer Bob Auger.

Perhaps in recognition of the loud amplified music that had pushed him aside, Ellington turns up the volume and the energy on the uptempo numbers, yet the slower paced numbers get nuanced, sublimely laid back treatment.

Engineer Auger recorded everyone and everything from Eric Leinsdorf to The Isle of White Festival to The Rolling Stones. A fan Mercury’s Bob Fine, Auger who died in 1998, engineered at Pye among other places and recorded The Searchers, probably The Kinks and many others. He inspired later engineering legends including Tony Faulkner.

Auger gets great sound in what sounds like a cavernous, less than ideal venue.

Auger’s mikes sound as if they're placed relatively close to the instruments and he’s spread the stage wide, but he allows just enough of the room to leak in to create a spacious, yet coherent and well-focused dramatic soundstage with the supply textured instruments set against black backgrounds. The venue sounds more like a roller-rink than a concert hall but Auger makes what sounds like either a two-track or at most four-track recording work effectively.

Listening to this recording in 2007, having put on a few years, produces complex layers of meaning and fresh appreciation both for Duke Ellington’s long, productive career and for how brilliantly he carried on in 1969 at the age of 70.