"I Let a Song Go out of My Heart"

Ev'ryone has a favorite song,
my heart has one too;
but I lost my favorite song,
that's why I'm so blue.

by Duke Ellington, 1938

"Black Beauty"

Recorded in New York City, New York, U.S.A., on October 1, 1928, "Black Beauty," composed by Edward "Duke" Ellington. Aww yeah:

This version sounds like it's a bit later than 1928, and features mainly Ellington playing the tune on piano, with a stride rhythm. This may be my favorite:


And there's this, slower, cooler, jazzier approach:

Reveille with Beverly

In the 1943 musical Reveille with Beverly, a character named Beverly Ross moderates a radio show with swing music, dedicated to local servicemen. It was based on the Reveille with Beverly radio show hosted by Jean Ruth Hay.

Hollywood glammed it up a bit, with Ann Miller portraying Jean Ruth Hay (Beverly Ross)
The movie/musical works today because it contains some of the greatest American music ever made, from artists such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, and The Mills Brothers.

Count Basie and Orchestra - "One O'Clock Jump":

Duke Ellington and Orchestra - "Take the 'A' Train" (click for great TCM video)

The Mills Brothers - "Cielito Lindo":

And some kid named Sinatra - "Night and Day":

"Sophisticated Lady"

Wikipedia entry:

"Sophisticated Lady" is a jazz standard, composed as an instrumental in 1932 by Duke Ellington, to which words were added by Mitchell Parish and Irving Mills. The words met with approval from Ellington, who described them as "wonderful — but not entirely fitted to my original conception."

That original conception was inspired by three of Ellington's grade school teachers. "They taught all winter and toured Europe in the summer. To me that spelled sophistication."

Here are Duke Ellington and His Orchestra in 1943, as documented by this RKO Pictures short feature. The band begins by playing "Mood Indigo," another Ellington composition:


From Jazz Standards:

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra introduced “Sophisticated Lady” with a 1933 recording that featured solos by Toby Hardwick (alto sax), Barney Bigard (clarinet), Lawrence Brown (trombone), and Ellington (piano). The recording entered the pop charts on May 27 and stayed there for 16 weeks, rising to number three. The flip side of the record, “Stormy Weather,” enjoyed nearly the same fortune, rising to number four.

On the Duke's birthday

From the Wikipedia entry:

A man of suave demeanor and puckish wit that masked occasional brusqueness, Ellington preferred to call his style and sound "American music" rather than just jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as "beyond category," including and especially many of the musicians who served with his orchestra.

Ellington was one of the twentieth century's best-known African-American celebrities. He recorded for many American record companies, and appeared in several films. Ellington and his orchestra toured the United States and Europe regularly before and after World War II.

Duke Ellington also appeared in a few television commercials. According to the YouTube description, this first one was filmed in Sydney, Australia, and it is for Craven Filter cigarettes (yucky).

A sure sign of evil among us?
It captures the Duke Ellington band in a "relaxed" mood during their 1970 tour. And they all do appear to be craven cigarettes, so there was truth in advertising. This footage is fabulous (downright historic), and the Duke's comb over never looked more elaborate:



Picture from the Zenith Circle of Sound page
Here is another one from 1970, and it is one Ellington did for the Zenith "Dual Dimension Circle of Sound." I love how effusive and bubbly he seems at the beginning when he says that "music is my life...love it madly" line. And according to the Duke, the Circle of Sound technology was a "new stereo thing." Isn't that all you need to know? I think so.

It seems odd to me he did stuff like this, but I guess legends can't live off of their fame alone:

"Lush Life"

Billy Strayhorn (November 29, 1915 – May 31, 1967) was an American composer, pianist and arranger, best known for his successful collaboration with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington lasting two decades. The composition most closely associated with Strayhorn is "Lush Life."

Billy Strayhorn was born in Dayton, Ohio. He began his musical career in Pittsburgh, where he studied for a time at the Pittsburgh Music Institute, wrote a high school musical and, while still in his teens, composed "Lush Life," a work that had the world weariness of an older man. (Info from the Wikipedia entry)


I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come what may places
Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life...
From jazz and cocktails.

The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces
With distant gay traces
That used to be there you could see where they'd been washed away
By too many through the day...
Twelve o'clock tales.

Then you came along with your siren of song
To tempt me to madness!
I thought for a while that your poignant smile was tinged with the sadness
Of a great love for me.

Ah yes! I was wrong...
Again,
I was wrong.

Life is lonely again,
And only last year everything seemed so sure.
Now life is awful again,
A trough full of hearts could only be a bore.
A week in Paris will ease the bite of it,
All I care is to smile in spite of it.

Ill forget you, I will
While yet you are still burning inside my brain.
Romance is mush,
Stifling those who strive.
Ill live a lush life in some small dive...
And there Ill be, while I rot
With the rest of those whose lives are lonely, too..
It's hard to believe a 16 year old wrote those lyrics! But that's nothing compared to the music. Here is a Stan Getz performance:


Putting lyrics and music together, here is Dianne Reeves doing a version of it from the excellent Independent Lens documentary of Strayhorn from a few weeks back (aired on my local PBS station, KERA):


In 1958, at a session for what would become Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, Sinatra attempted to record a version. It remains one his two best-known uncompleted Capitol projects (the other being a version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Soliloquy"). From Sinatra! the Song Is You: A Singer's Art, here is the story behind what happened:

Sinatra's attempt at Strayhorn's best-known vocal ballad, "Lush Life,"...was at once marked for greatness and failure. The first came in Nelson Riddle's masterful arrangement, which juxtaposes a deliberately out-of-tune piano against a Coplandesque string section. The second in that, as Bill Miller recalled, Sinatra "didn't take the trouble to learn it" correctly and tried it at an already overbooked date.

Although he turned in a stunning tune number eight, "Willow, Weep for Me," he didn't have the physical fortitude to make it through number seven, Strayhorn's ambitious air. "It's a rather complicated song, and I think Frank would have been momentarily put off by all the changes that had to go on," said Riddle. "Not that he couldn't have sung it with ease and beautifully had he tried a couple of more times." On the sole circulating partial take of the three allegedly recorded, Sinatra gets through the out-of-tempo "verse" section but breaks down in the refrain. After a characteristic Kingfish impression, he resolves to "put it aside for about a year." Sinatra later told Miller that he had decided to "leave that one for Nat Cole." (p. 302)

Once again from the Independent Lens Strayhorn documentary, here is the only version of that "sole circulating partial take" one is likely to ever hear. It's unfortunate, because it sounds like it would have been great:


You can actually hear him slam the door to the studio as he storms out!
Sinatra would go on to record an entire album with Ellington and company years later, which was a "disaster" of a larger scale, but that's a different story/post:
Francis A. Sinatra & Edward K. Ellington (1967)

Speaking of Sinatra's great Capitol Records collaborator, arranger, and conductor Nelson Riddle, he worked with Linda Ronstadt during the eighties when she recorded her trilogy of American songbook albums, What's New (1983), Lush Life (1984), and For Sentimental Reasons (1986).

Arrangements for Ronstadt's "What's New" (1983) and "Lush Life" (1984) won Riddle his second and third Grammy Awards.

Apparently she had more time to prepare for her recording of "Lush Life," because it not only made in onto an album, but she also named the middle one in the trilogy after it. You can hear a few seconds of her version here.