Jazz in the Sixties - Duke Ellington in the Sixties

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If you were a recent high school graduate looking forward to a career as a Jazz drummer when the 1960s dawned, chances are that when the decade was over you would have moved on to other things.

For in a mere 10 years, the vibrant Jazz scene with its many clubs, concerts and festivals would have been reduced to a shadow of its former self as the burgeoning Rock ‘n Roll styles began to hold sway over the listening and dancing public as the decade progressed.

Ten years earlier, the advent of the 1950s marked the demise of the big bands as the preferred form of Jazz and now, in less than a generation, Jazz had also lost its small group audience and become an “art form” preferred by a select few.

What happened and how it happened in the decade of the nineteen sixties is superbly summarized in the following excerpts from Mark Tucker’s booklet notes to the Mosaic boxed set - Duke Ellington: The Reprise Recordings [Mosaic MD5-193]. In them, Dr. Tucker also explains how the Duke and his orchestra managed to survive the carnage although their existence would also soon come to a close with Duke’s death in May, 1974.

Mark Tucker was a music historian and pianist who, at the time these notes were written, taught at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He later went on to assume a similar role at Columbia University until his untimely death in 2000 at the age of 46. His books include Ellington: The Early Years, The Duke Ellington Reader, and (with Garvin Bushell) Jazz from the Beginning.

“‘Jazz in the Sixties’ — the phrase evokes images of musical freedom, rebellion, protest and experimentation. It was a time when artists spurned conventions and set out for uncharted aesthetic territory — uncompromising innovators like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor; free-jazz virtuosos like Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders; theatrical avant-garde troupes like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Sun Ra Arkestra; eclectic iconoclasts like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Misha Mengelberg and Willem Breuker. Miles Davis kept pushing restlessly ahead during the decade, exploring new sounds and textures with his quintet featuring Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, then going electric to usher in jazz-rock with such landmark recordings as IN A SILENT WAY and BITCHES BREW (1969). Other fusions occurred as musicians drew upon rhythm-and-blues, gospel and soul, producing recordings — like Cannonball Adderley's MERCY, MERCY, MERCY (1966) and Les McCann and Eddie Harris' COMPARED TO WHAT (1969) — that captured a historical moment when jazz seemed to be reinventing itself for the younger generation. As the music reached out and crossed boundaries, fresh influences flowed in from different parts of the globe — Brazil, Africa, the Middle East, India. The important idea was to keep moving, seeking, changing, whether it was Miles pursuing "Directions in Music" (as the phrase appeared on his Columbia albums), Coltrane taking listeners to INTERSTELLAR SPACE, or Sun Ra offering PICTURES OF INFINITY.

With this musical ferment and forward motion taking place against the turbulent backdrop of American social and political events — the civil rights struggle, the rise in black nationalism, the Vietnam war, the birth of the counterculture, the riots, demonstrations, love-ins, freedom marches and assassinations — it's easily forgotten that for many in the jazz world, the main challenge posed by the 1960s was professional and economic survival. 

This was especially true for musicians who had come of age in earlier decades when jazz had enjoyed widespread popularity — when young people danced to it, listened to their favorite bands in theaters and on the radio, and bought the latest recordings of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, or even Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan. But jazz recordings weren't selling as well in the '60s, and teens were dancing to the beat of different drummers. It was too late for older artists to revamp styles and develop new personae, but at least they could try to keep up with changing times. Partly they did so through repertory, covering current hits and show tunes — like Louis Armstrong's HELLO, DOLLY!, Ella Fitzgerald's THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING and Count Basie's theme from EXODUS. They branched out into bossa nova and added rock tunes to their set lists — especially songs by the Beatles. Some may have taken the step reluctantly — a 1965 Gerry Mulligan LP featuring hits by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Petula Clark was plaintively titled, IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, JOIN 'EM. Other accomplished jazz musicians, though, faced with diminishing job opportunities and disappearing incomes, headed for the studios of New York and Los Angeles where they recorded for television and movies. While their younger contemporaries were getting into "the new thing" and aligning themselves with the vanguard, many seasoned players were simply trying to cut their losses and pay the rent.

Those who led and performed with big bands found themselves in a particularly difficult position in the 1960s, aesthetically as well as economically. Swing-era survivors like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Woody Herman and Lionel Hampton had a core group of followers getting older and grayer; these bands had to tour constantly to reach their audience, just as they'd been doing for decades, and to some extent had to keep playing old tunes and styles to keep fans happy. At the same time, if they sought exposure in the mass media and wished to remain successful recording artists, they had to respond to changing tastes and trends. Nothing could be worse for a jazz musician than to be perceived by the public as "square." Ellington addressed the need to stay current in a 1962 interview with Stanley Dance: "The Twist is bringing people back to dancing, which I think is a very good thing— With everyone in the whole world doing the Twist, you're out of step if you don't do it. I do it. I don't like to be odd." Ellington even registered the pressure to conform in the lyrics to a song from his Second Sacred Concert of 1968, SOMETHING ABOUT BELIEVING: "I want to be hip, I want to be cool/I want to be with it all the way/Because I ain't about to be no fool."

The conflicting generational tugs felt by Ellington, Basie and other swing-era veterans were less problematic for younger musicians associated with big bands in the 1960s. They could forge identities as contemporary musicians in step with the times, whether through the rhythms of rock and soul that animated charts played by Quincy Jones and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra, or the adventurous metric experiments and non-western currents found in the music of Don Ellis. But few of these newer ensembles sought to provide full-time employment for their members; as historian Bill Kirchner has pointed out, they often fell into the category of "rehearsal" or "part-time" bands. This is not to diminish their achievements — merely to point out that the paths they followed in the '60s, and the musical options available to them, were quite different from those faced by long-time bandleaders like Basie, Herman and Ellington.

In many ways, Ellington's professional activities during the 1960s resembled those of earlier decades. Constant touring kept the band on the road for much of each year. There were regular visits to recording studios, film projects and television appearances, and for Ellington himself, the usual whirl of interviews, press conferences, award ceremonies and special events that kept him in the public eye. Throughout, there was the steady production of new music, from shorter instrumentals and songs to longer works unveiled in concert halls and at festivals.

A closer look at Ellington in his sixties, however, reveals that his career was picking up speed and becoming more intense at a time when many are planning for retirement. For one thing, the band's international travel increased during these years, not just with repeated, near-annual trips to Europe but also visits to the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, India and Japan. Also, Ellington became involved with a number of large-scale musical projects that often required intricate juggling of his touring schedule. These included the show My People in 1963, the First Sacred Concert of 1965, the musical Pousse-Cafe in 1966, the Second Sacred Concert of 1968, scores for the films Paris Blues (1960) and Assault on a Queen (1966), and incidental music for the plays Turcaret (1960), Timon of Athens (1963) and Murder in the Cathedral (1966). Ellington added all this to his regular composing and arranging labors, his nightly performances and ceaseless motion.

He did have help meeting these challenges. His invaluable creative collaborator was Billy Strayhorn, the composer, arranger and pianist who had been with the organization since 1939, and who kept working for Ellington up until the time of his death in May 1967, at the age of 51. Strayhorn made major contributions to Ellington's composing and recording projects of the first half of the 1960s, from SUITE THURSDAY and the settings of Tchaikovsky's NUTCRACKER SUITE and Grieg's PEER GYNT SUITE (1960), through a string of albums that followed, among them MIDNIGHT IN PARIS and ALL AMERICAN IN JAZZ (1962), AFRO-BOSSA (1963), DUKE ELLINGTON-MARY POPPINS (1964) and THE FAR EAST SUITE

(1966).

Ellington also derived benefits, both as composer and bandleader, from a certain degree of stability in personnel. This was especially true in the reed section of Johnny Hodges, Russell Procope, Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves and Harry Carney, which remained intact from when Hodges rejoined the band in 1955 until Hamilton departed in 1968. Returning veterans, too, such as trombonist Lawrence Brown (1960) and trumpeter Cootie Williams (1962) brought back their vivid colors to Ellington's tonal palette and helped reconnect the band to its storied past. Another key figure was trumpeter and violinist Ray Nance, who had first joined the band in 1940 and stayed, with a few interruptions, until September 1963, putting in another stint in the first half of 1965 and making only sporadic appearances thereafter. Then there was lead trumpeter and high-note specialist William "Cat" Anderson, whose tenure stretched from 1944 to 1971. Together with Strayhorn and the reed section, these four brass players provided ballast to Ellington's orchestra in the 1960s, steadying its course and giving direction during a time of flux and uncertainty.”

What was to follow from about 1962 to 1967 was a series of recordings that Ellington made for Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label, among them Afro-Bossa [1963], which according to Mark “ranks among the best albums he ever made.”

To be continued in a separate blog feature highlighting all of the Duke Reprise recordings.