Rec. Date : July 7, 1956, July 9, 1956
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Orchestra : Duke Ellington’s Orchestra
Billboard : 12/29/1956
Spotlight on… selection
Herein is the Ellington performance that stampeded last summer’s Newport Jazz Festival and brought the Duke back into the jazz picture, but good. The number that blew things apart was Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, with its 27 consecutive tenor sax choruses by Paul Gonsalves. One can hear and feel the crowd and then the band catch fire. Unfortunately, Gonsalves was off the recording mike thruout, or this package could be a runaway. As is, it will only be a hit. Rounding it out is the fine new Newport Jazz Festival Suite and a remake of Jeep’s Blues, featuring the wonderful Johnny Hodges.
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Cashbox : 12/29/1956
Columbia has begun releasing performances from the jazz doings at Newport, R.I. this past summer. The two releases here feature […] Duke Ellington and his Orchestra performing three pieces on the other waxing. […] Ellington’s disk includes an original Newport Jazz Festival Suite in three selections, his 1938 opus Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue and Jeep’s Blues. The Ellington approach, of course, is the traditional, clean swing style of a first-rate order. These disks are wonderful mementos of the Newport concerts and a worthy addition to the jazz disk catalogue.
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Down Beat : 12/12/1956
Nat Hentoff : 4.5 stars
First side is entirely made up of the Suite, written for Newport and performed at several festivals thereafter. The three movements are Festival Junction, Blues to Be There and Newport Up. Junction is hardly memorable thematically, with a too-long rhetorical prelude by Jimmy Hamilton. But there is an agreeable string of solos by Jimmy, Duke, Willie Cook, Paul Gonsalves, Britt Woodman, Harry Carney, Quentin Jackson, Russell Procope, and Cat Anderson (who ends up on an asteroid). It’s a swinging opening. There is more substance and arresting unity in the Blues, the second section, which contains thoughtful comments by Duke, Procope, on clarinet, as well as Nance on trumpet. The final panel, like the first, is less interesting for its overall pattern than for the potential of its soloists. Hamilton, Gonsalves, and Clark Terry, in this instance, are only moderately effective. The work as a whole is some distance from a major Ellington achievement. In the trialog round at the end, Terry comes off best.
Jeep, a Hodges vehicle, is funky at an unhurried pace. Then came the deluge, the Diminuendo and Crescendo with the 27 rocking choruses in between by Paul Bunyan Gonsalves that turned the final night into Dionysian rites and convinced nearly everyone present, including me, that a memorable event was occurring. Hearing the phenomenon, several months later, away from the charged open air volcanic atmosphere, I feel that the emotional brush fire that ignited and united the audience remains an indelible memory, but I’m afraid the music that caused the conflagration doesn’t wholly hold up. Admittedly it’s bracing to hear the work itself (though I’d also suggest you listen to the original recording for the power it can sustain in a more integrated and shared performance). It’s also kicks to hear and feel Duke’s vitality on piano and in his vocal exhortations. And certainly, there is a gripping, rising excitement in the remarkable length and spare consistency of Gonsalves’ solo over a rhythm section rocking in a uniquely heated groove (and aided by the coxswain-strength of Jo Jones, an assist the notes explain). And the long, climbing ensemble close over a gyrating shouting audience of 7,500 is also an experience that will chill you.
Yet although Gonsalves, as Avakian notes, knew how “to tread the narrow path between Spartan simplicity and embroidery to a degree just short of destroying the hypnotic effect (he) achieves by adhering to the rhythm section’s conception,” the fact remains that Paul wasn’t saying too much except rhythmically, and after a number of hearings, even the contagious excitement of the beat and the crowd can diminish for lack of sufficient imaginative content in the conception.
Yet again, it’s certainly a rare, exciting experience, even if you weren’t there to remember sights as well as sounds, and of all the four Newport albums, this is one I’d recommend you buy if you’re on a budget. It is too bad that Newport, in its haste to get enough money to cover some of its expenses, didn’t try to work out a pool recording with other companies so we could have had a real representative selection of the festival highlights (Mingus and Hamilton and Charles, for example).
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Liner Notes by George Avakian
Overshadowing everything else, including the introduction of a new work written expressly for this recording at Newport, Duke Ellington‘s performance of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue in the last set of the 1956 Festival turned into one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of this annual event.
Within an hour, reporters and critics were buzzing about it. By next morning, it was generally conceded to have been one of the most exciting performances any of them had ever heard. All were agreed that it was a triumph of the good old rocking (R&B, if you will) blues beat which has been too often missing in jazz in the last fifteen years. All were also agreed that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Typically Duke was enjoying a perfectly successful appearance when he announced this 1937 medium-tempo blues (Duke said 1938, but it was written a year earlier) but no one was planning to break out the champagne or wave flags. Duke opened with four introductory choruses on piano; by the second, the rhythm section had already laid down a rocking beat and Duke had served notice of what was to come. Three minutes later, following the long series of ensemble choruses, Duke took over for two more rocking choruses that kicked off Paul Gonsalves playing one of the longest and most unusual tenor sax solos ever captured on record.
Gonsalves played for 27 straight choruses. Of that, more later, for there are three levels at least from which this extraordinary feat must be viewed. (It should, of course, also be heard.) At about his seventh chorus, the tension, which had been building both onstage and in the audience since Duke kicked off the piece, suddenly broke. A platinum-blonde girl in a black dress began dancing in one of the boxes (the last place you’d expect that in Newport!) and a moment later somebody else started in another part of the audience. Large sections of the crowd had already been on their feet; now their cheering was doubled and redoubled as the inter-reacting stimulus of a rocking performance and crowd response heightened the excitement.
Throughout the rest of the performance, there were frequent bursts of wild dancing, and literally acres of people stood on their chairs, cheering and clapping. Yet this was no rock ‘n roll reaction; despite the unbridled enthusiasm, there was a controlled, clean quality to the crowd; they were listening to Duke as well as enjoying the swirling surge of activity around them. Crouched just off the edge of the stage, where I could signal back to the engineers if anything unexpected happened onstage during our recording, I had a rare view of the audience (at least 7,000 were still there, about midnight of the last night). Halfway through Paul’s solo, it had become an enormous single living organism, reacting in waves like huge ripples to the music played before it.
But the management and the police, unable to sense the true atmosphere of that crowd as it felt from the stage, grew more apprehensive with every chorus. Fearful of a serious injury in the milling crowd, which by now had pressed forward down the aisles (the open area between the boxes and the elevated stage was already jammed with leaping fans), producer George Wein and one of the officers tried to signal to Duke to stop. Duke, sensing that to stop now might really cause a riot, chose instead to soothe the crowd down with a couple of quiet numbers.
Out of sight of the crowd was an unsung person who is quite possibly the person most responsible for this explosive performance. No one will ever know for sure, but perhaps the Ellington band might never have generated that terrific beat if it weren’t for Jo Jones, who had played drums that night with Teddy Wilson. Jo happened to be in a little runway below the left front of the stage, at the base of the steps leading up from the musicians’ tent behind the bandstand. From this vantage point, hidden from the crowd by a high canvas, but visible from the shoulder up to the musicians, Jo egged on the band with nothing more than appreciation and a rolled up copy of the “Christian Science Monitor.” As Duke (whose voice you can hear from time to time) drove the band in the early stages of Diminuendo and Crescendo, first the reed section and then the trombones and finally the rest of the band picked up on Jo, who was shouting encouragement and swatting the edge of the stage with the newspaper, about eighteen inches from my squatting haunch. (as this target has grown more inviting over the years, I was careful to stay an arm and a half’s length clear of Jo at all times.) The saxes began hollering back at Jo, then the rest of the band joined in, and by the time Gonsalves had sprung the dancers loose it seemed that bassist Jimmy Woode and drummer Sam Woodyard were playing to Jo as much as to anyone else. Even the super-placid Johnny Hodges, who will probably not raise a half-masted eyelid come millennium-time, smile and beat time back at Jo.
Gonsalves dug in harder and harder, and when he finally gave way to Duke, the release was electric. But only for an instant, for Duke himself was swinging, and when the band pitched in with the low-register clarinets plumbing misterioso depths, the tension built anew. (Don’t miss the rhythm section’s excruciatingly-delayed return after the first chorus with the clarinets. What would normally be a 4-bar break turns into 7!) With Duke and Jo still whipping up the band from opposite sides of the stage, the last choruses climbed to a climax topped by Cat Anderson, Duke’s high-note specialist, who booted everybody home after the 59th chorus. Flat here and there? Nobody complained then, and don’t bother us now, boy!
As we were saying about eight hundred words ago, Paul Gonsalves rates some examination on his own. His staunchest fans would never rate Paul among the giants of the saxophone, but after his feat at Newport one wonders who else could have sustained 27 choruses without honking or squealing or trying to take the play away from what really counted – the beat. I can think of two or three others who might have done it – but I just as easily can imagine them running into complications of their own making. But that matters little, because the point is that Paul did it.
They key, obviously, lies in knowing how to tread the narrow path between Spartan simplicity and embroidery to a degree just short of destroying the hypnotic effect that Gonsalves achieves by adhering to the rhythm section’s conception. This is not the place for soloist to take over: he cannot grab the spotlight; he must remain one with the driving beat and yet not fall into dullness. A “display” saxophonist would probably have burned himself out within ten choruses, thus reducing the permanent value of this performance as it happened to develop (although the crowd might have enjoyed it just as much at the time).
Thus the Paul Gonsalves solo is not really a solo at all, but a leading voice supported by many parts, and never letting down the conception of those parts; the beat laid down by the drums, and occasionally Duke’s piano, and equally important the reacting support of the crowd, the girl who danced, the enthusiasm of the rest of the band (which did not play at all behind Paul, but which kept the beat with him and drove him on with shouts of encouragement which Paul must have sensed were something more than just routine showmanship) and Jo Jones’s wadded “Monitor.”
And as we were saying a thousand words ago, until D. and C. came along, Duke figured to have been remembered at Newport for his new work, written for this appearance. When George Wein approached me with the idea of Columbia recording at the 1956 Festival, he said he had asked Duke to write a composition for Newport; a few days later Duke played in New York, and agreed to finish the piece (which he and Billy Strayhorn had already started) and to record at Newport. He came through handsomely, as the three movements of this Suite attest, especially when one considers that the band had had only two short rehearsals while on the road prior to the Newport performance. The Blues to Be There themes are among the most memorable bits of Ellingtonia to come along in years. By the way, note how audience and orchestra (including Duke, usually quite vocal in his cries of encouragement from the piano) are busy concentrating on the new music during this performance.
Opening the other side of this album, ahead of Gonsalves Rides Again, is the Johnny Hodges showpiece, Jeep’s Blues. This, too, could be the top item in any other Ellington collection. But Diminuendo and Crescendo was really the climax of Ellington at Newport ’56 and the proof is right here, uncut and already mellow.
The introductory remarks at the start of this recording are by Father Norman J. O’Connor, Catholic chaplain of Boston University and one of New England’s staunchest jazz enthusiasts.
From time to time, a flood of soloists appears in this album, and it seems advisable to list them in the order of their appearance. In the first movement of Festival Junction (which is also the title of the movement itself) are Jimmy Hamilton (clarinet), Ellington (piano), Willie Cook (trumpet), Gonsalves (tenor sax), Britt Woodman (trombone), Harry Carney (baritone sax), Quentin Jackson (trombone), Russell Procope (alto sax), Cat Anderson (trumpet).
Procope (this time on clarinet) and Ray Nance (trumpet) are the soloists in the second movement, while Hamilton and Gonsalves are heard again in the third, along with trumpeter Clark Terry. In Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, a few bars of Nance’s plunger-muted trumpet and Carney’s baritone sax are heard in the last two choruses of the first long ensemble, and Hodges is heard for a few measures against the brass in the fiftieth chorus. Remaining credits are covered in the preceding text.
There is still more Ellington at Newport in a Columbia album which includes Buck Clayton‘s All-Stars (CL 933), as well as a complete personnel listing of the Ellington band. Other Columbia Newport albums are CL 931, which features Louis Armstrong and Eddie Condon, and CL 932 by the Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Jay & Kai Quintet.