Terry and The Duke

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In Kenneth Grahame’s beloved literary classic, The Wind in The Willows, Badger recounts the  discovery of the ferrets in Toad Hall and says “we rush in upon them” while Mr. Toad ecstatically runs around the room exclaiming “and we whack ‘em and whack ‘em and whack ‘em.”

That’s exactly the impression I was left with after reading Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington [New York: Gotham Books, 2013]. Each and every aspect of Duke career is banged, bashed and battered until the Duke of legend is re-formed into a flesh and blood human being with frailties, foibles and follies.

With this treatment of the most respected composer in Jazz by one of the music’s most highly regarded critics, one thing is certain: the days of Ellington idolatry and hagiography are officially over.

This is not a book about Duke Ellington as written by another adoring sycophant. Mr. Teachout takes away the mirrors and the magical illusions and reveals the Ellington self-centeredness that was his personal prescription for a happy life.

As the Duke expressed it: “No problem. I’m easy to please. I just want to have everyone in the palm of my hand.”

“That serene egotism lay at the heart of an extraordinary career that made him a living Jazz legend, renowned composer  and celebrated bandleader. The inimitable style of his music - known as the ‘Ellington effect” - left musicians amazed and audiences enchanted….

A man of gargantuan appetites for food and women as well as music, he believed that doing exactly what he wanted when he wanted was the key to maintaining the vital spark that made him special, ordained for spectacular success. …  

His success was a product of his personal charisma (a rival bandleader described him as ‘more than suave’) and uncanny talent. Ellington transformed big-band jazz by fusing improvisational spontaneity with structural compositions. He turned individual voices into musical material, ensuring an Ellington piece had an organic unity, alive in the moment.” [The Economist, 11/9/2013].

While it is true that many of the Ellington band members contributed themes, riffs and improvisations that would eventually be incorporated into the Ellington canon and harbored resentments about the lack of acknowledgement or credit for these offerings,   Mr.Teachout is very clear about the fact the band’s achievements are inseparable from the Duke and his glittering personality.

“For half a century he kept his splendid show on the road, writing music not for posterity, but because he wanted to hear it now. The result was an unequalled body of work, from his string of 1940’s classics, including his annual Carnegie Hall concerts, to the landmark performance that ignited the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival and relaunched his career, to his globetrotting during the 1960’s and 1970’s, which ceased only with his death from cancer in 1974. Through it all the man himself remained an enigma, keeping lovers and musicians alike at arm's length, but in the palm of his hand. And always, as Mr Teachout writes, he was ‘a genius, a titan of modern music who to the end of his life could conjure high art out of thin air.’" [Ibid]

In trying to reveal the true Duke, Mr. Teachout set no easy task for himself as he was taking on a supposed Master of Deception who had over half-a-century of practice and lots of helping hands, willingly or otherwise, as many around him were hiding their true feelings from one another and participating in the masquerade.

Chris Foran writes in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Duke Ellington has always been a little hard to figure.”

Mr. Foran goes on to explain that although Mr. Teachout “doesn’t exactly decode the Duke, ... his exhaustive mining of the archives” gives us a more in-depth portrait than we’ve ever had.before. The Duke embodied civilized refinement on stage but struggled offstage to juggle all of his extramarital affairs. He is widely celebrated as one of the greatest composers in jazz history but is known for having lifted many of his best ideas from musicians under his employ. Critic Terry Teachout, a former bassist, focuses mostly on Ellington's music in this rigorously researched biography, showing ‘again and again’ how the great bandleader appropriated others' riffs and melded them into tunes that have become jazz standards.”

In other words, Mr. Teachout ‘whacks him and whacks him and whacks him.” And some people are very upset about this tendency.

Jazz musician and author Loren Schoenberg wrote the following on the internet chat group Organissimo.com.

1) "VERY TROUBLED as I begin Terry Teachout's seemingly tremendously ignorant recent book on Ellington.

2) For starters, the pejorative attitude he brings to bear from page one. Any positive comment is preceded and sometimes followed by negatives. He clearly doesn't understand the role of IRONY in African-American culture in general, and in Ellingtonia specifically, which is suffused with it. The comments about Duke not being educated enough to write a score without hearing the guys play it during the compositional process is just pure merde, nothing more. The comparisons with classical music are also way off the mark.

But above all, it's the patronizing tone. He is the true heir in his race insanity to Collier and Sudhalter, though unlike the latter, and like the former, he is a dunderhead when it comes to real musical analysis. That's just for starters."

And on the same forum, Jazz author Larry Kart had this to say about Terry Teachout’s biography of Duke [paragraphing modified]:

"Leaving aside [Loren's] claims of racism, which I'm happy to do, I'm not happy with what seems to me to be TT's fairly consistent obtuseness. For one thing, and this runs throughout, there's TT's more or less aghast, hand-wringing stance at Duke's sexual behavior. No, neither your nor I would have behaved as Duke did, or so I assume, but beyond a certain point what's the point of all this? And in the world or worlds of which Duke was a part, how bizarre, if at all, was his behavior?

More important, though, there is the theme of "Duke was not at all a well-versed (that is, trained in the techniques and principles of classical composition) composer," thus his would-be long-form pieces largely fail to cohere, etc. Let's stipulate as to the latter, up to a point and with some exceptions. But why does TT think that such training would have, in Duke's case, led him (I emphasize him) to create coherent long-form pieces of real merit? BTW, in that vein TT keeps throwing "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris" in Duke's face and in our faces too.

If those are TT's standard of long-form American works that really cohere formally and are of real merit, I'm at a loss. I mean, they're fun, they're tuneful, they're forever popular, but come on. Further, and this is my main complaint, after all the major and semi-niggling negatives about Duke's life, lifestyle, and music that TT musters, he himself must face something like "Ko Ko" (and of course the list of such Ellington works is a lengthy one) and not only describe and account for the nature and quality of those works but also relate them to the nature and quality of Duke's musical career as a whole.

This last issue, I think, if "issue" is the way to put it, again has something to do with TT's apparent belief that a classically trained Duke was what was called for, either that or his lack of classical training was a clear-cut deficit. But if, as I think we can safely say, the Duke of "Ko Ko" or you name it knew some very important things about how to make music that no one who would have/could have given him classical training (certainly early on and probably at any time) probably knew and/or was willing to sufficiently/insightfully credit, what then? In any case, it seems to me that whenever TT gets to stuff like "Ko Ko," he kind of shuts down, just doesn't manage, doesn't even really try to, relate these achievements to everything else.

And that, to my mind, is the one place one has to go satisfactorily and insightfully if one is going to deal with a figure like Ellington. Not the only place one needs to go, yes, but.... That is why, with all of Andre Hodeir's at times annoying baggage (annoying at times at least to my mind), his writing about Ellington's masterpieces remains so important.”

Notwithstanding, these strong takes on the relative merits of Mr. Teachout’s work on Duke by Messrs Schoenberg and Kart, or the fact that all of us use masks, or false personalities, from time-to-time to present ourselves to [and protect ourselves from] the world, perhaps we should heed these words from Ted Gioia, another Jazz scholar, writing in The Dallas Morning News, when he states:

“Many Ellington fans will feel that Teachout has gone too far” [when he implies that the Duke’s ambitions outstripped his talents] “but give Teachout his due as he has taken on a legend who worked hard to keep his private life secret as he has torn through the veil.”

Mr. Teachout’s central themes are outlined in his Prologue which he entitles “I Want To Tell America,” [The irony in this chapter title is that it appears from a reading of Mr. Teachout’s biography that telling anyone, anything about himself was the last thing that Duke Ellington wanted to do].

In addition to the false personality that Duke used to present himself to the world, Mr. Teachout maintains that Duke Ellington “... was the most chronic of procrastinators, a man who did today what he could put off until next month, or next year.”

“Nothing but an immovable deadline could spur Duke Ellington to decisive action, though once he set to work in earnest, it was with a speed and a self-assurance that amazed all who beheld it.”

Returning to his masquerade theme, Mr. Teachout writes: “Few of … [Duke’s] pronouncements could be taken at face value - he was never in the habit of telling anyone, even those who supposed themselves to be friends, what he really thought.”

Here are more of Mt. Teachout’s premises:

- “Clark Terry, one of the many stars of the band … said of him: ‘He wants life and art to be in a state of becoming….’” [paraphrase]

- “Whether it is true or merely one of his rationalizations for doing whatever he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it, Ellington lived by those words.”

- “‘Duke drew people to him like flies to sugar,’ said Sonny Greer, one of his oldest friends and his drummer for thirty years. He was well aware of how charismatic he was, and he used his powers without scruple whenever he thought it was necessary.’”

- “As early as 1930 Ellington was telling reporters of his plan to compose … [an extended piece … of music].... Instead he kept on carving one three-and-a-half- minute cameo after another ….”

- “That was Ellington’s way. He talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself.”

- “Ellington was the first to write music that used the still new medium of the big band with the same coloristic imagination brought by classical composers to their symphonic works.”

- “Everyone knew that it [January 23, 1943 Carnegie Hall Concert] was Duke’s night to shine, and he knew it, too. Yet he had put off writing what was to be his crowning achievement [Black, Brown and Beige] until the last possible minute.”

- “He had never in his life attempted anything as challenging as Black, Brown and Beige, and he had not given himself enough time for second thoughts, much less a second draft.

- Black, Brown and Beige was … an astonishing advance on the dance-oriented music of other big bands of the Swing Era …. To take it in at a single hearing, …, was impossible, but every critic did his best ….”

- The reviews ranged from “One of the longest (45 minutes) and most ambitious piece of tone painting ever attempted in jazz,” to “formless and shallow.”

- Because of the mixed but mostly negative public reaction and critical reviews - “I guess they didn’t dig it,” Duke was to say - after two more performances and a partial recording of Black, Brown and Beige, “never again did he permit his critics to hear his magnum opus from beginning to end. Too proud to expose himself a second time to their wrath, he preferred to leave it on the shelf ….”

- “Ellington composed as he lived, on the road and on the fly…. It would no more occur to him to take time off to polish a composition than to go on a month-long vacation.”

- “A largely self-taught musician, he had never-acquired the conservatory-bred facility that would have allowed him to write out a piece in his studio, bring it to rehearsal and have his sidemen read it down note for note. He was himself a poor sight reader, as were some of his best known soloists.”

- “He preferred to hire musicians with homemade techniques that were different to the point of apparent incompatibility, then juxtapose their idiosyncratic sounds as a pointillist painter might place dots … [of color] side by side on a canvass, finding inspiration in their technical limitations …. That’s why his charts [arrangements] never sounded quite right when performed by other groups, ….”

- “Not only was Ellington inspired by the sounds and styles of his musicians, but he plucked bits and pieces from their solos and wove them into compositions. Some of his most popular songs were spun out of melodic fragments that he gleaned from his close listening on the bandstand each night.”

In spite of this tendency to “glean” from the work of other musicians, a number of times in the Introduction and throughout the remaining fifteen [15] chapters of the book, Mr. Teachout refers to Duke as a genius, a great composer and the writer of masterpieces.

But the reader is left a bit uncertain about such praise, because elsewhere in the Introduction and throughout the remainder of the book, Mr. Teachout exerts a great deal of effort in what appears to be an attempt to tear Duke down, if not, apart.

In other words, he whacks him and whacks him and whacks him.

For example Mr. Teachout concludes a paragraph with the statement that the Duke was “... a genius, a titan of modern music who to the end of his life could conjure high art out of thin air.”

But the introductory part of this very same paragraph reads: “So he chose to keep on being Duke Ellington, racing from town to town and sleeping with woman after woman, shoveling his songwriting royalties into the till in order to pay his expensive gentlemen salaries big enough to keep them riding on the band bus, cranking out shapeless suites whose inspiration varied widely, even randomly, from movement to movement, and passing the work of others off as his own.”

Genius or charlatan-cad-crook; which is it?

When Mr. Teachout writes elsewhere in the introduction - “For all his polish, it was … [Ellington’s] artistry not his personality that was the source of his enduring appeal” - one is never quite sure whether to believe him.

More central to the tone and tenor of Mr. Teachout’s work is this statement: “Ellington was a self-centered hedonist who lived a nomadic existence in which everything was subordinated to his art - and, insofar as possible, his pleasure.”

The remainder of Mr. Teachout’s book is a playing out of these themes and premises over chronological chapters covering Duke’s career [he died in 1974].

In his monumental The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945, Gunther Schuller devotes almost 120 pages  to - Duke Ellington: The Master Composer.

In Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, Terry Teachout devotes 360 pages to essentially establishing Duke as a master of deception, a procrastinator, a dawdler, a shilly-shally artist, a great pretender, a musical coward, a robber of the work of others, a self-taught musician who lacked conservatory training and, above all, a supreme egotist.

Duke Ellington may have had the last laugh - he lived life the way we all wish we could - on his own terms. Who are we to judge him for this act of courage?

This picture taken in 1963 at London’s Dorchester - THE DORCHESTER! -  may go along way toward explaining the manner in which Duke Ellington approached life. Not bad surroundings for the son of a black butler, eh?

Stan Tracey: 1926-2013 - R.I.P.

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Every time I heard pianist Stan Tracey play, I wondered why I didn't listen to him more often.

His playing was so inventive; so different. In its originality, he reminded me quite a bit of pianist Gordon Beck, who like Stan, had served for a number of years as a member of Ronnie Scott's Jazz club's house rhythm section that would accompany Jazz musicians visiting from the USA and Europe.

Actually, it was Gordon Beck who first hipped me to Stan during his long engagement at Shelly's Manne Hole with the Phil Woods European Rhythm Machine [Ron Mathewson was the bassist and Daniel Humair was the drummer].

Gordon said: "He's a cat you should look out for."

The problem was where?

Stan was in London and I was in Los Angeles.

I finally located some records he had made with tenor saxophonists Ben Webster and Charlie Rouse and after listening to them it didn't take me long to realize what all the fuss was about.

Stan Tracey passed away on December 6, 2013, and we wanted to remember him on these pages with the following obituary as published in The Times of London on Tuesday, December 8, 2013.

"One of the best-known musicians in British jazz, the pianist Stan Tracey led groups of all sizes from a trio to a big band, and managed to stamp his distinctive musical personality on them all. He was one of the first musicians to create convincing jazz using British sources of inspiration, and his suite inspired by Dylan Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood remains his most enduring legacy. 

Seldom out of print from its first appearance on disc in 1965, the romance, humour and darker underside of Thomas’s Llareggub were perfectly reflected in Tracey’s writing, and further enhanced by the brilliance of the recorded performance by his quartet, which included the saxophonist Bobby Wellins.

A pianist whose style was rooted in the angular phrasing of Thelonious Monk, coupled with the subtle chord voicings of Duke Ellington, Tracey brought a spiky individuality to his sound, and was a stimulating accompanist as well as a strikingly unorthodox soloist.

His terse conversational style, laconic humour, chippy personality and self-deprecating manner tended to play down the breadth of his achievements, not least his prolific recording career, which began in the 1950s and continued into the early part of this year.

Stanley William Tracey was a Londoner, born in 1926, and he started out by playing the accordion, although he transferred his main attention to the piano at the age of 13. Nevertheless much of his early professional work was as an accordionist, first in various ENSA entertainment groups, then (during his National Service from 1945-48) in the RAF Gang Show, and finally in the early 1950s in the quintet led by the blind pianist Eddie Thompson. He also began to make a name for himself as a pianist in the world of postwar professional dance bands which harboured many a would-be jazz musician. As a result he met several of those who became formative influences on the British modern jazz scene, including Ronnie Scott and the pianist-cum-percussionist Laurie Morgan, who both encouraged him to develop his talent for playing jazz.

In common with many jazz-struck musicians of his generation, he found a job playing in the ships’ bands for Cunard (known after their bandleader-booking agent as “Geraldo’s Navy”). During the brief spells when the Queen Mary or the Caronia docked in New York, he was able to hear all the great names of American jazz in person, including his great influences Ellington and Monk, not to mention the innovative Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, whose music made an equally strong impact. Back in Britain, he continued to make his living in the dance band world, playing with Roy Fox, Malcolm Mitchell and Basil and Ivor Kirchin. He also played briefly with the veteran American bandleader Cab Calloway on a flying visit to Britain. Later he was reunited with Calloway in the 1980s for a BBC television special filmed at the Ritz Hotel. Then, during rehearsals for I Get the Blues When It Rains, Tracey played a particularly jagged avant-garde break that thundered from top to bottom of the keyboard. Calloway stopped the band, and asked “What the hell was that?” Tracey calmly replied: “The pissingest rain I could manage.”

In the 1950s he found every opportunity to escape the dance band routine and play jazz, notably with Kenny Baker, the drummer Tony Crombie and Ronnie Scott, with whom he toured the United States in early 1957. That same year, he joined Ted Heath’s orchestra, by far the jazziest of British dance bands, for whom he played both piano and vibraphone.

It was the seven years that Tracey subsequently spent as the house pianist at Ronnie Scott’s club from 1960 that cemented his reputation and also gave him the experience, unparalleled by any other British pianist of the time, of working night after night with such American stars as Don Byas, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, Roland Kirk, Zoot Sims, Ben Webster and — particularly — Sonny Rollins, with whom he performed on the original soundtrack of the film Alfie. Rollins said at the time that few Britons realised just how good Tracey was, although he was much liked by the majority of American visitors to Scott’s who immediately recognised him as an authentic and individual jazz voice.

As Tracey explained in the 2003 Channel 4 documentary on his life The Godfather of British Jazz, playing night after night at the club, running his own quartet, writing and recording new music, and starting a family took their toll, and what with the readily available drink and drugs that pervaded the nocturnal Soho jazz scene, his health broke down. He left Scott’s in late 1966, but not before he had written and recorded both Under Milk Wood and his first big band suite Alice in Jazz Land based loosely on the writings of Lewis Carroll.

He now had a recording contract with Columbia, and, as well as producing some excellent small band successors to his Dylan Thomas suite, he also made some first rate albums with a studio big band, notably a tribute to Ellington, We Love You Madly, which featured such soloists as the saxophonist Tony Coe and trumpeter Ian Carr in Tracey’s muscular arrangements. Carr (who became well-known as a critic and broadcaster) was particularly effusive about Tracey’s writing on a follow-up Ellington album that featured, of all people, Acker Bilk. Pieces such as Mood Indigo, Carr wrote, “seem to have inspired Stan Tracey to write arrangements which go beyond mere craftsmanship: each one is a small masterpiece, developing organically all the way to the end. A very slow number is a real test for any band, but the poise and lazy attack of his brass ensemble on Mood Indigo is about the nearest thing to perfection I’ve heard.”

Yet in contrast to the structure of his big band work, Tracey was also exploring free improvisation, not only in duos with such players as Mike Osborne, but on his album Free an’One in which the alto saxophonist Peter King joined his regular trio with the bassist Dave Green and drummer Bryan Spring. Humphrey Lyttelton wrote at the time that it revealed “how little Stan Tracey’s creative range is inhibited by the established conventions of set theme, set key and set chorus length”.

The beginning of the 1970s was an altogether bleaker time for Tracey, with little work about for freelance jazzmen, but his wife Jackie set to with Hazel Miller (the wife of the South African bassist Harry Miller) to create playing opportunities, summer schools, and recording dates. Before long, Tracey was every bit as productive as he had been in the 1960s, playing in a bewildering variety of contexts with such groups as Splinters and Tentacles, as well as his piano duo with Keith Tippett, T’n’T. Much of his work was documented on his own record label Steam, which he founded in 1975. Partnerships with John Surman, Trevor Watts and Mike Osborne were developed that showed him well able to keep pace with a younger generation of improvisers. From 1978 his son Clark (then aged 17) joined him as the drummer in all his bands, from trio to full size orchestra, a working relationship that continued thereafter until the end of his life. For much of that time, the saxophonist Art Themen was an equally consistent colleague.

As the 1980s began, Tracey was a well-respected figure, having been the subject of a BBC Omnibus documentary, and the recipient of British Council touring grants that took his band to Central and South America, Greece and the Middle East. Yet despite this growing recognition and numerous awards, culminating in his appointment as OBE in 1986, he still found himself working as hard at finding work as actually performing, although his compositional talents were fostered by commissions from Bolton, Ulster and Durham.

This last became one of Tracey’s most enduring large-scale pieces, when he was asked to create a Sacred Concert based on Ellington’s work for the 900th anniversary of Durham Cathedral in 1990. Tracey transcribed and arranged an extremely effective sequence drawn from Ellington’s three Sacred Concerts, involving choir, solo singers, narrator and his big band. It has been performed many times since, not only in other cathedrals and churches, but also at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. That was also the site of a 1993 concert marking his 50th year in jazz, drawing together musicians from all his various ensembles, for a Radio 3 broadcast which was subsequently released by Blue Note Records.

In his latter years, Tracey was seldom absent from one or other of the annual award ceremonies for British jazz musicians, and in 1997 he was also invited to give the final concert at the Governor’s Residence in Hong Kong, followed by additional performances of a newly commissioned suite in mainland China, making him the first British jazz musician to perform there.

As he approached his eighties, he announced his intention to give up composing and arranging, and play music that was either “already in the cupboard” or improvised in performance. One of his final large compositions was Continental Shift for a sizeable band, which he and his son Clark wrote together in 2002 for the Arts Council. However, the urge to compose, coupled with the financial inducement of the occasional commission brought him back to writing in his last years, and his final album, The Flying Pig, was written and recorded earlier this year. It brought the younger musicians Mark Armstrong on the trumpet and Simon Allen on saxophones together with his regular trio, in a set of pieces that looked back at the laconic humour and horrifying experiences of Tracey’s own father in the trenches of the First World War.

The 2003 Channel 4 documentary, and the subsequent Jazz Britannia series on BBC Television cemented Tracey’s reputation as a senior figure in the British jazz establishment. Yet he continued to perform regularly, mainly winning accolades for new work, and fresh recordings such as those by his quartet with Peter King, and a newly-formed duo with the experimental improviser Evan Parker. He seldom lived on past successes, save for putting Under Milk Wood back on the road from time to time, with his original colleague Bobby Wellins still playing the saxophone parts, but with his grandson Ben Tracey as narrator. He was to have performed the piece at this year’s Glasgow Jazz Festival, but had to withdraw owing to the onset of the cancer that killed him.

He is widely regarded as a mentor by those who have worked for him, such as the trumpeters Guy Barker and Gerard Presencer, and the saxophonist Mornington Lockett.

He is survived by his son Clark and his grandson Ben, both of whom continue to perform his works. Clark in particular has continued to lead the Stan Tracey Octet this year to fulfill engagements that his father was too unwell to attend.

Stan Tracey, OBE, jazz pianist, bandleader and composer, was born on December 30, 1926. He died on December 6, 2013, aged 86"

Peggy Lee: [Still] The Incomparable [From the Archives]

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The work with Goodman was grueling. The Paramount theater in New York is notorious in the memory of everyone who played it. They hated it, and those who survive still do. They played seven or eight shows a day, between movies, starting at 10 a.m. And at one point, Peg remembered, the band was adding to that schedule a set at the Terrace Room of the New Yorker Hotel. There was never time for a meal: the musicians survived on sandwiches brought to them by Popsy Randolph, the band boy, later a well-known photographer. Yet the experience was invaluable. She was absorbing lessons no school can teach, things that go deep into the subconscious, into the viscera, even into muscle memory.

"Johnny said something someplace," Peg said to me in one of our con­versations. There was no need to specify who Johnny was. To both of us, there was one Johnny: Mercer. "It had to do with sudden fame being so dangerous. So many people have sudden fame and they can't handle that. If you have to pay your dues, you have to do it.

"I used to call Benny Goodman's band boot camp. A finishing school.

"Time has to pass. You need a lot of experience. You learn as you go. You crawl before you walk before you run. You know how to handle a situ­ation on the stage when some crisis comes up. If it's early in your career someplace, it doesn't matter because very few people are going to see it or hear about it, and it won’t be in the trades the next day: So-and-so bombed.

That’s the heavy advantage of learning how to handle your stage presence by the experience you’ve had. If you do even a high-school play and the butler doesn’t come in when he’s supposed to, you learn to improvise. Or if you’re gown gets caught on the heel of your shoe, you learn to lean on the piano while somebody crawls under there and unfastens it. ” [pp. 136-37]

“Pianist Lou Levy, her accompanist and conductor over a longer period of time than any other, said, "Norman Granz, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and I went to hear her at Basin Street East in New York. We were all leaving for Europe with Jazz at the Philharmonic. I had just worked with her, and we all knew her. She did her tribute to Billie Holiday. By the time she was halfway through it, Norman, Ella, and Oscar were all in tears. It was that accurate. It was eerie. I guess I was the only one who didn't cry because I was dumbstruck by what was going on. She scared Count Basie to death with it."

‘I used to do it,’ Peg said. ‘But it brought so many people to tears that I stopped.’" [p. 141]

“[I was] … watching videos of two of her television shows at her home in Belair. She wore a tight, stark black gown in one, an equally tight white one in the other, and she had a gorgeous, voluptuous figure. I noticed in these shows something I had first paid attention to when she would play the Copacabana in New York: the min­imal use of motion. Such, however, was the effectiveness of the focus she established that if she cocked an eyebrow, the whole audience would laugh at the minute expression.

So, watching her stand almost motionless, singing, on television, I said, "Peg, where the hell do you get the courage to do absolutely nothing?"

There was a long pause. Then she said, "There is power in stillness."

[p. 141]

There is little I could write on these pages that would do justice to the storied career of vocalist and song writer, Peggy Lee, or, as she was often introduced – “Miss Peggy Lee.”

But when a friend who is affectionately known in some circles as “The Sage of the Florida Swamps” commented so favorably and adoringly about Peggy’s rendition of Geoff Parsons and Michel Emer’s If You Go, I decided, at minimum, to develop a video tribute to her using this tune as it’s audio track and post it on the blog.

Then, as I was searching through my Peggy Lee recordings while working on the video project, I came across the following insert notes by the late, eminent Jazz author, Gene Lees, which I thought provided a succinct look at what made Peggy such a great artist.

And thus, this brief profile of one of Jazz’s most unique, song stylists came into being.

Gene also devoted an entire chapter to Peggy entitled In from the Cold: Peggy Lee which you can find in his book, Singers and the Song II, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1998.

The quotations and related pagination that I used to open this piece are excerpted from the chapter on Peggy from Gene’s book.

© -  Gene Lees, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“There have been few careers in American music to compare to Peggy Lee's. Miss Lee evolved into our greatest singing actress, producing in her performances of songs—many of which she wrote—indelible character sketches of women in all walks of life. Her work has never flagged, the quality of it has never faltered, and she is still at it.

She is the most deceptive of artists, because she does what all great artists do: makes it look easy. She never shouts. I think of her work as Stanislavskian, because instead of projecting a song "at" you, she illuminates it from within. The closest parallel to her way of performing that I have ever found is the acting of Montgomery Clift. It is as if her songs are not so much heard as overheard.

This album is a return to the blues for her. Blues is a term that has two levels of mean­ing. Strictly speaking, it is a form of song 12 bars long with a specific harmonic structure. But the word has been used in a broader sense to mean any sad song. This album em­braces both meanings.

Six of the 12 songs are in true blues form: See See Rider, You Don't Know, Fine and Mellow, Kansas City, Love Me, and Beale Street. And Taint Nobody's Bizness, which is in eight-bar form, is assuredly a bluesy tune, and one that has long been associated with blues singers.

Singing the blues is a separate art. The great blues singers have tended to stay within the form, eschewing the classic American popular song. And the finest singers of the popular song have as a rule avoided the blues. Peggy Lee is one of those rare people-indeed, I can think of only one or two others—who are comfortable and convincing in both. Sometimes I get the feeling she can sing anything—and always with that deceptive ease.

The richness of the blues form is illustrated by the variety of the six songs named above; the form is the same but the flavor in each case is different. The richness of Peggy Lee's gift is illustrated in the way in which she brings out the differences.

Two of the songs are strongly associated with Billie Holiday. The influence of Billie Holiday in American music was, for a long time, enormous. And critical writings have often cited Peggy as one of the singers influenced by Billie. For myself, I was always more aware of the differences between them than the similarities. Those differences came sharply into focus one day when we were discussing singing, and to illustrate a point, she sang a phrase exactly—and I mean exactly—as Billie would have done it. It was uncanny. But it served to show how far apart they were in sound and style, though not in essential inspiration.

It has long been a tradition among jazz players to make reference in solos to the great source figures of the tradition—trumpet players quoting Louis Armstrong's opening passage of West End Blues, for example, or saxophone players quoting parts of Lester Young solos. I have never heard a singer do this until now. It's clever and subtle and you might miss it.

Peggy does two songs that were among those most closely associated with Billie Holi­day, the haunting and disturbing God Bless the Child and Fine and Mellow. The lyrics in both cases are by Billie. The music of God Bless the Child is by Arthur Herzog, but that of the blues Fine and Mellow is Billie's. Notice how Peggy pronounces some words in Fine and Mellow, for example the long I in the rhyming words yellow and mellow. It's a subtle, gentle, loving tribute to Billie Holiday, a reminder of a source. And it's charming.

Furthermore, if you remember his recording of the song, you may hear a smiling little tribute to Jack Teagarden in Basin Street Blues (which is not, by the way, a true blues, despite the title).

There is another way in which this album has a sense of return. Her performances on New American Jazz were accompanied only by a small jazz group. Later recordings involved large orchestras and some marvelous arrangements by gifted writers. Here she returns to a small-group context and some superb accompanists.

Some of the best accompanists to singers are players who themselves like to sing. Pianist Mike Renzi sings well—I've heard him—and drummer Grady Tate has recorded albums as a singer. The rest of this superb quintet consists of John Chiodini, guitar, Mark Sher­man, percussion (including vibes), and Jay Leonhart, bass.

It is little understood, except by singers themselves, that extremely soft performances are more difficult than bravura belting. The way Peggy sings high notes softly has always amazed me. Hers is the gentlest of voices, but there has always been power in reserve behind it, and she does amazing things with it. She has remarkable control. Notice how in See See Rider—done in three-four time—she comes into the first note low on the pitch and slips up into it, to suspenseful and bluesy effect, and then echoes it when the phrase recurs in the fourth chorus. Her singing is filled with shading of that kind.

The blues form is an American national treasure.

But then, so is Peggy Lee.

Gene Lees”