When we talk about Ellington we cannot forget Billy Strayhorn. Take a listen to Ellington’s tribute album to Billy “…and His Mother Called Him Bill” Billy was a genies in his own right. His influence is almost invisible at times because of his ability to channel Duke in his writing. He did not get credit for his contributions in the early years although Duke always gave him his due.

One thing about The Newport festival – none of the great moments there would have ever occured without Elaine Lorillard. It was her passion for jazz that was the seed for all of it. She came up with the concept and convinced her husband to finance it. Jazz had never before been performed in an outdoor festival setting. They ran it as a non-profit. It lost money. Lot’s of money. Thank you Elaine.

But the optimism of ‘The Great Society” is where I think I was going. That was a swinging ambition – if flawed (like Charlie Parker himself)

LBJ’s Swingitude is also badly shaken, of course, by Vietnam. Perhaps RFK would have shown this contrast had he lived. The name Kennedy practically equals Swingitude!

And Silvio Rabioso,

I deeply respect your point and I thank you for posting those lyrics.

You have put up a perfect suggestion about ATC Quest’s work and deft use of the Ron Carter baseline. You have a good point about some very honest, and educational Hip Hop. There is hope in the lyrics (and therefore swing potential) regarding loss of something “back in the days” and that “things go in cycles”.

But the thing that jumps out in the lyric is ‘Pager’ and the drug-dealing connotations of that word. I understand IT IS A DESPERATELY HONEST LYRIC. Rap is great at honest feelings of longing, anger, facts of life, keeping things real, and so on.

“Before I had a pager” suggests we are listening to a drug dealer yearning for a way out of some life he is somehow stuck in.

Lots of Jazz players did drugs – Heroin, everything – but the music soared despite the drugs.

Crime doesn’t pay – and hip hop nobly repeats this message often yet it gets caught up in the paradox of its own circularity of celebrating crime anyway.

And crime don’t swing.

Just sink yourself into the magnificent “Paradise Lost” (which ultimately swings by the way) for the liveliest ruminations anywhere on the banality of rulebreaking.

Al Capone didn’t swing. Enron didn’t swing. Halliburton doesn’t swing.

“The Godfather” can’t swing

but the Movie, “The Godfather”, ABSOLUTLEY SWINGS.

For example, a looter may need to rob to live.

It is honest to face this – it is a fact – it is REAL. I won’t deny it.

A drug dealer may see himself trapped in a social paradox with no exit.

Hip-hop is repleat with such honesty about drugs, power, violence, racism, class and, as in your excellent example, some real education.

Word UP! Remember KRS-1?

But the Rap and Hip-Hop sound speaks first and foremost to the futility of its world. Don’t you think?

And futility don’t swing.

I’ve been meditating on Swing since I heard you on the show. Maybe swingitude, with its implication of an innate sense of rhythm, grace and ease in navigating in the world, should be a criterion for judging all politicians. But try as I might, I can’t see any evidence for LBJ’s swingitude. He worked through domination–demanding that staff accompany him into the john while he defecated, lifting his beagles by the ears, humiliating political opponents. He seemed every bit as graceless and ill at ease as Nixon.

A strong strain of East-Coast hip-hop, especially during the 1990s, founds its inspiration in the jazz albums of its parents.

Let me give you the first few lines off the first track of A Tribe Called Quest’s masterful album The Low End Theory…by the way, the track begins with a Ron Carter baseline:

Back in the days

when I was a teenager

before I had status,

before I had a pager

you could find the Abstract

listening to hip hop

my Pops used to say

it reminded him of bebop

Well I said that Daddy don’t you know

things go in cycles…

–

And who has done more to popularize Blue Note with the younger generation in the last 5 years than Madlib? Although his “Shades of Blue” might not sample Ellington, he can swing.

Now I’ve gotta add Ellington after the early 50’s to my already floorboard-sagging CD collection. I’d contentedly figured the Duke of the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s was as good as it gets. Then you ROSers had the temerity to play the ’56 Newport stuff.

Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Some of us are poor, you know…

Unfortunately, it’s worse than I realized: it IS my system. I stole a few minutes on a different computer in this building, and the WGBH stream was working normally.

However, I have no idea why I can hear the stream from KUOW/KXOT but not GBH. Worse yet, while I’m ‘streaming the silence’, the streaming signal is nevertheless jamming up my piece-of-crap 20k rural phone line internet connection, slowing to a crawl all other internet business I want to conduct simultaneously. Now, when I’m receiving the sound, I can live with the crawl. But I can’t live with it just for silence.

So, the stream is coming into my hardware, but something in my software is blocking the sound from the speakers.

How dismal.

Guess I’ll have to revert to being an exclusively time-delayed-on-air listener again. And permanently – unless anyone out there recognizes the symptoms and can finger the cause of my problem. (For what it’s worth, my anti-virus protection has lately taken to shutting itself off for no apparent reason, too. Coincidence? Beats me. I’m a tech-world Luddite.)

Hope the show was great, and I’ll be listening at midnight Eastern. (KUOW airs it at 9 Pacific.)

Rather than listening to the rebroadcast version via KUOW-FM at 9 PM PDT, I have been getting it live online via http://www.wgbh.org Monday through Thursday.

I bought that Columbia recording of ‘Ellington at Newport’ in 1959 or 1960 when I was at Uni and I practically wore it out. I still have that original recording, but no stylus; though I having since found the tape version. Someday I may look for a CD of it. I still get goose-pimples listening to “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”.

Chris, I am loving this program as it is going on via my FM tuner.

I had the enormous good fortune of meeting Ellington backstage at Newport, about an hour before his history making set and the famous Paul Gonsalves solo. I was a socially immature fourteen and I watched him charm into helplessness the middle-aged, Jewish-liberal lesbian lady whose charge I was. “Well, I could never have imagined,” said the Duke, “that my good friend Judge Handel had such an elegant, magnificently beautiful daughter,” he crooned to her before offering me his signature on the Festival program book. Wide-eyed, I took all of this in and filed it away for future reflection.

I must have 15 Ellington CD’s in my collection, but oddly enough not the Newport concert. I think the near-riot in the audience must have scared me — I was only a little kid after all. Now after your show I have to acquire that one too.

I guess along with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen, Ellington ties as the most powerful musical personality I ever managed to encounter.

But neither of those two French worthies ever gave me a lesson in how to seduce a pretty woman….

Cheers.