The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation by Keith Hatschek

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Documenting a largely untold history of Black and white jazz artists teaming up to challenge Jim Crow, with Cold War tensions and the emerging civil rights movement as a backdrop, the tale of The Real Ambassadors is a story within a story. … Understanding its complicated road to the stage against the backdrop of its underlying message can provide insight today, at a time when race relations are once again at the forefront of national discourse. 

“Dave and lola Brubeck and the cast of The Real Ambassadors collectively made a bold social and political statement at a time when many Americans were angry, confused, and in search of answers — lifting their voices to help bring about social change one song at a time. They can be seen as part of a wave of mid-twentieth-century American musicians, filmmakers, and artists who spoke out loudly against discrimination in direct response to their troubled times. This story illustrates the vital role that artists can play as ambassadors of the truth, speaking for equality and justice, both in their own time and through their art, for all times. It demonstrates the importance of keeping our eyes on the prize, even if we may never see that prize fully realized in our own lifetime.”

- Keith Hatschek, author

Frequent visitors to the blog may recall that the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has a special fondness for Dave and Iola Brubeck’s Jazz musical The Real Ambassadors featuring Louis Armstrong, Carmen McRae and Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan [Annie Ross performed on the studio recording made a year earlier] along with Pops’ All-Stars and Dave’s “classic” quartet which premiered at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival, sadly, it’s only performance with this group of musicians.

If you scroll down the blog’s sidebar [right hand column] under LABELS - The Real Ambassadors, you’ll find links to the nine previous posts on the subject.

Well, it would seem that we are not the only ones smitten by the significance of this moment-in-time performance as now, thanks to the auspices of the University of Mississippi Press as part of its “American Made Music Series”, comes a full book length treatment on the subject. 

In his well-written The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation, Keith Hatschek focuses on a not only on a comprehensive treatment of background of the Jazz musical but also brings forth a Jazz story which somehow is rarely emphasized in articles and chronicles about the music - cooperation rather than contention between white and Black musicians.

All too often, especially these days, the narrative focuses on how whites ripped off the Blacks who invented Jazz and went on to commercially benefit at their expense.

Thankfully, Keith Hatschek’s book sheds light on another important story about the Jazz World - how white and Black musicians came together to create entertaining and inspiring music.

And had it not been for the compact disc “revolution” of the 1980 and 1990, the general story of The Real Ambassadors might still be known only by members of the Jazz cognoscenti.  As the author explains:

“The Real Ambassadors remained largely forgotten, until the compact disc boom of the early 1990s. During that time, in a rush to capitalize on the new format, record labels dug through their vaults to reissue recordings for listeners eager to upgrade their music collections. Columbia Records hired producer John Snyder to put together a reissue of the 1962 Real Ambassadors soundtrack album. The 1994 compact disc release featured four additional cuts that were not on the original album, offering fans a complete set of all the songs recorded in the September-December 1961 sessions, including Armstrong's spoken-word rendition of "Lonesome." Satchmo's poignant reading of lola's text echoed that moment in December 1958 when he had performed the lyric for Brubeck. The recording demonstrates Armstrong's dramatic talents:

All of my life, I've been lonely.

I'll go way back in my past.

I’ll tell you about Lonesome,

How the winters last and last.

I know the loneliest autumns,

Watching the leaves slowly turn,

Sad as the tag end of summer,

When dreams with the leaves will burn.

I've stood alone in springtime,

High up on a hill,

Cried in the rain in springtime,

Cause no one's there to share the thrill.

There a certain glory in summer,

Quiet contagious joy.

There is a silent story in summer, 

That calls to the mind of a young boy. 

You fell in love in summer, 

Then grew up far too fast. 

Still he returns each summer, 

To visit in the past. 

The past. 

The past.

The recording is unlike anything else in Armstrong's massive catalog: he played the song's melody on trumpet, accompanied by Brubeck, then over-dubbed the lyrics as a recitation, rather than singing the melody.' One can hear the emotions developed over a lifetime by Satchmo as a touring Black artist who had experienced so many forms of discrimination yet still hung on to a joy for his life as a musician and optimist. Armstrong biographer Ricky Riccardi sums up the chilling effect:

Though "Summer Song" is about as melancholy as a song can be, "Lonesome" really has some deep, low notes. Perhaps Brubeck toyed with the idea of using his Quartet to back Pops on this one, but in the end, someone had the great idea of having Pops play the melody on the trumpet while overdubbing his monologue on top of it. The result is almost an Armstrong sensory overload ... he's coming at you from all angles! Having him just speak the words without alluding to anything that remotely resembles a melody gives the song a chilling quality... the words of "Lonesome" should be written down for it truly is much more a poem than a song.

It's a completely straight-faced performance, though he manages a slight chuckle after mentioning the "young boy," His voice goes way down for the final repetitions of "the past." He sounds tired and scared, but it's just the true sign of Armstrong's acting ability. He was marvelous at conveying drama and "Lonesome" is one of his finest moments.1

Reflecting on this performance, one can imagine the dimension Armstrong would have brought to a fully realized musical theater production of The Real Ambassadors.

The reissue also included Carmen McRae's alternate reading of "Summer Song," an abbreviated version clocking in at nearly a minute less than Armstrong's performance, in which he repeats the bridge and a verse. McRae's reading is more delicate and understated, and it showcases how she could infuse lyrics with extra meaning through her gift for phrasing and inflection. The other previously unreleased tracks included the 45-rpm version of "Nomad," whose lyrics depict Dave Brubeck's experience while staying in Kabul, Afghanistan, on his 1958 State Department-sponsored tour. He heard the muffled beat of drums and a lone flute as nomadic shepherds drove their herds through the city on their way to the mountains. Brubeck described it as the "weirdest sound I ever heard."3 Joe Morello lays down a Latin-style beat using his toms, and clarinetist Joe Darensbourg conjures up visuals of a snake charmer with his harmonic minor introduction, leading into Armstrong's bouncy interpretation. An instrumental version of the song had appeared on the quartet's 1958 release, Jazz Impressions of Eurasia.

The fourth and final addition on the 1994 reissue was "You Swing, Baby," a duet featuring McRae and Armstrong set to the melody of Brubeck's well-known standard "The Duke." The timing and playful exchange between the two singers show off their natural chemistry. Satchmo takes two verses on trumpet, staying close to the melody while adding a few flourishes. The song concludes with the following passage:

Pops: When you send me, I stay gone. People ask me "what I'm on." Rhonda: To quote a phrase from ol' Satchmo, if ya gotta ask, then you'll never know! Pops: [ad lib—"I'm in love"] 

Pops: You swing, baby, you swing for me. I vote you soul mate of the

century.

Rhonda: Alone I sing a melody ... 

Pops: But it takes two for harmony. 

Together: Singing, swinging, our lives complete... as long as you're in

rhythm with the consummate beat. Living, loving, the human race

... this makes this crazy, mixed up world a swinging place.

In this lyric, lola cleverly included Armstrong's oft-cited rejoinder to the question he had often been asked: "What is jazz?" His famous answer was always, "If you gotta ask, then you'll never know." The fun Carmen and Louis were having on this recording is palpable, so it was a loss that the song never made it into the Monterey performance.

While the addition of these four numbers to the Brubeck catalog was noteworthy, it was of greater import that the CD reissue brought the musical back into the consciousness of the jazz community. A new generation of jazz musicians too young to know about its historic 1958 performance recognized that the work was truly groundbreaking, and its message of tolerance and

equality still resounded more than a half century after its creation. Writing about the CD reissue for AllMusic.com, critic Scott Yanow awarded it a four-star rating and characterized the work as "a largely upbeat play full of anti-racism songs that celebrated human understanding." He cautions listeners who are familiar with the cast members not to come to the disc with too many expectations, as "Paul Desmond is nowhere to be found, Louis Armstrong does not play that much trumpet here, and Lambert Hendricks and Ross essentially function as background singers." He does praise the duets between McRae and Armstrong as making a potent team, concluding by offering that the disc reveals "many touching and surprising moments"4 

The CD sold a total of 5,189 copies in the two-year period following its 1994 rerelease, nearly as many as the original album, and reported a negligible fifty-nine copies returned to Columbia for credit, only i percent of albums shipped.5

If you are not familiar with the background of the original performance of The Real Ambassadors, author Hatschek offers the following description of its evolution in the Prologue of his well-researched and richly detailed work:

“On the evening of September 23,1962, as civil rights momentum was escalating to a fervor, a cast of thirteen talented artists came together at the Monterey Jazz Festival to perform The Real Ambassadors, a jazz musical challenging racial inequality. The culmination of five years' work, the musical was written by well-known jazz musician Dave Brubeck and his wife, lola, expressly to feature the most celebrated jazz musician in the world, Louis Armstrong. That night, they performed a slimmed-down one-hour "concert version" of what was envisioned as a three-act Broadway show, and their hope was that this premiere would help make that full production dream a reality. Supporting players included Carmen McRae, the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan, and Armstrong's All-Star band, along with Dave Brubeck, Eugene Wright, and Joe Morello.1 lola Brubeck, who wrote the book and co wrote the lyrics for her husband's songs, provided narration from a separate temporary stage to frame the musical numbers and explain the show's themes.

The musical was inspired in part by the US State Department and its cultural ambassadors program, which had been sending American jazz musicians abroad beginning with Dizzy Gillespie's 1956 tour. These jazz ambassadors toured overseas as a form of cultural diplomacy, promoting jazz as a uniquely American art form and touting it as a product of a free society. The Brubecks' Real Ambassadors offered a nuanced portrait of these jazz ambassadors, drawing heavily on the experiences the couple had during their own State Department-sponsored global tour in 1958. Selling the notions of freedom and equality abroad was intended to present a contrast to the opposing totalitarian model offered by the Soviet Union. Ironically, however, while America's Black jazz ambassadors were treated as royalty abroad, they still suffered racial prejudice at home on a daily basis.

The Real Ambassadors told the story of this irony, chronicling the hard road traveled by jazz musicians on tour for Uncle Sam in the 1950s. Led by a charismatic trumpeter and vocalist, "Pops," and his love interest, the band's

vivacious female singer “Rhonda," the show's lyrics and dialogue made plain the Brubecks' belief that segregation must be overturned and that artists should take a stand to work toward social justice. The Real Ambassadors tackled controversial themes head-on, and some of its concepts could be considered blasphemous at the time — for example, posing the question "Could God be Black?" in one of the musical's most memorable songs, and dreaming aloud of a time when integrated music groups might be able to perform in Mississippi. Historian Penny Von Eschen argued that bringing the show to the stage at the height of the civil rights movement was not without risk. She stated:

“From our present day perspective, these types of statements defending civil rights and egalitarianism seem relatively mild, but when this was produced, America was at the height of the violent civil rights movement, and the federal government had not yet begun to take a stand to defend civil rights advocacy on a formal level. It was a very bold, controversial act at that moment in time."1

In evidence reconstructing the musical's rocky path to the stage, we see that music industry power players such as Columbia Records president Goddard Lieberson warned the Brubecks to avoid such controversy if Dave and lola wanted to see the musical realized.

In the early 1960s, the battle over civil rights in the United States was front and center on nightly newscasts, and the musical and its message were perfectly attuned to the national debate. At the time, powerful governmental, economic, fraternal, and institutional groups in the US were aligned to prevent the end of racial segregation by working actively to sustain the centuries-old practices of Jim Crow, ingrained practices that restricted the civil and societal rights of Black Americans and relegated them to second-class status. Even though the landmark 1954 decision reached in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation, local leaders scoffed at the law and maintained strict segregation throughout society, most prominently in the South. Powerful leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Dr. Ralph Abernathy, and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had raised their voices and were taking action to demand an end to segregation. Nonviolent actions including marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and teach-ins led by ministers, students, and activists were reported regularly in the media — especially when such peaceful acts caused violent responses from those strongly opposed to breaking the grip of Jim Crow. The nation was undergoing a crisis of unprecedented scope.

Within twelve months of the show's debut, the tragic evidence of a nation divided would be apparent to the whole world. Only a few days after the show's 1962 premiere, James Meredith enrolled to attend the University of Mississippi, the first African American student to do so. This led to riots that left three persons dead, six policemen shot, and dozens injured on the campus. A few months later, in May 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference rallied students of all ages to march peacefully in protest to downtown Birmingham, Alabama, where the notorious commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, ordered fire hoses used on the children, knocking many off their feet and shredding their clothes. This inhumanity was documented everywhere, from major networks' nightly newscasts to the front page of the New York Times, where on May 4th, an iconic photo spread showed a Black high school student, Walter Gadsden, being attacked by Connor's police dogs. Four months later, on Sunday, September 15,1963, the murder of four young girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing further stunned the nation. News coverage of the protests dominated every form of media, and every day, Americans were reminded of the sacrifices being made by citizens of color.

Given this context, it is no surprise that The Real Ambassadors' road to the stage was neither straightforward nor simple, spanning five years of the lives of Dave and lola Brubeck, the creators and evangelists who were determined to bring the show to life. As Dave Brubeck's own music career blossomed, he made his position on civil rights a cornerstone of his identity, both as an artist and an American. He was quoted frequently in interviews with a courageous mantra: that society would benefit from becoming color-blind. His ideals had come from observing how his father, Pete Brubeck, managed the large ranch in California's Central Valley where the family lived in the 1930s. His father treated everyone with respect, hiring ranch hands who were white, Mexican, and Native American. The young Brubeck worked summers and after school as a ranch hand, side by side with these men, while attending the local public school in lone, California, where he had a number of friends who were Native American. The pianist's humanistic values advanced through his subsequent experiences as a young GI leading what was likely the first integrated US Army band, the Wolfpack, during World War II.3 After the war, Brubeck hired African American bassist Wyatt "Bull" Ruther as a member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951-52.4 

In 1958, another Black bassist, Eugene Wright, became a mainstay of the quartet. Due to Jim Crow restrictions on integrated bands performing in the South, the Dave Brubeck Quartet had to cancel twenty-two dates of a 1960 Southern college campus tour. Brubeck refused to replace Wright with a white bassist, losing an estimated $40,000 in income. Having witnessed firsthand the sting of discrimination through his many musical friends and colleagues, Brubeck and his wife developed a deep-seated commitment to equal rights for all.

The Brubecks used their wits and resources to enlist the aid of every like-minded show business contact they had in order to make The Real Ambassadors a reality. Still, the performance itself was nearly torpedoed in the weeks leading up to the festival by Armstrong's manager, Joe Glaser, a powerful man who saw much to lose and little to gain from such an endeavor. Likewise, Armstrong's own wife, Lucille, feared that tackling difficult new songs might have been beyond her husband's reach at that time, as he had suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1959 while on the road in Italy and was weakened by forty years of non stop touring.

The night of the premiere belonged to the cast. At its conclusion one critic noted that "the performers were rewarded with a standing ovation by 5,000 fans. Everyone applauded, some wept."5 Critics unanimously praised the work as a bold statement supporting equal rights, telling the story of African American musicians with dignity and sensitivity in a way that deserved national attention. With these endorsements ringing in their ears, the Brubecks' five-year effort to bring the full production to Broadway or television felt within reach. But the growing success of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which came to be the most popular small jazz ensemble in the world, eclipsed The Real Ambassadors, until it reemerged in the 1990s as a vital, if overlooked piece of Brubecks and Armstrong's careers. In the twenty-first century, it has enjoyed three revivals, which have proven that the timeless messages in it still ring true today.

Documenting a largely untold history of Black and white jazz artists teaming up to challenge Jim Crow, with Cold War tensions and the emerging civil rights movement as a backdrop, the tale of The Real Ambassadors is a story within a story. Wrapped around the production's fictional plot was a very real account of struggle in the civil rights era, as Louis Armstrong and Dave and lola Brubeck fought to present a musical designed to foment social change. Understanding its complicated road to the stage against the backdrop of its underlying message can provide insight today, at a time when race relations are once again at the forefront of national discourse. 

These talented artists demonstrated that challenging racism, xenophobia, gender bias, and other hate-based creeds requires logic, compassion, wit, and above all, dogged persistence—and that the reward may come in unexpected forms and on unexpected timelines. Dave and lola Brubeck and the cast of The Real Ambassadors collectively made a bold social and political statement at a time when many Americans were angry, confused, and in search of answers — lifting their voices to help bring about social change one song at a time. They can be seen as part of a wave of mid-twentieth-century American musicians, filmmakers, and artists who spoke out loudly against discrimination in direct response to their troubled times. This story illustrates the vital role that artists can play as ambassadors of the truth, speaking for equality and justice, both in their own time and through their art, for all times. It demonstrates the importance of keeping our eyes on the prize, even if we may never see that prize fully realized in our own lifetime.

Here’s an idea: get yourself a CD of The Real Ambassadors and a copy of Mr. Hatschek’s book and listen to the former while reading the latter. Add a couple of scoops of your favorite ice cream in a bowl and I guarantee you're in store for a memorable experience. [You may want to keep more ice cream at hand.]

For order information on Mr. Hatschek's book go here.

Francis A. & Edward K. and Billy May, Too

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In researching material for the blog, I’m constantly amazed at how tight-knit and relatively small the Jazz community is and how this has been the case almost since the music’s inception, but especially during the first quarter century of its existence when everyone seemed to know everyone.

The phrase that’s often used today to describe such a phenomenon is “six degrees of separation” that reflects a theme in which everyone on earth is theoretically separated from everyone else by only six people.

As a case in point, when I did some background on the 1967 [released in 1968] Reprise album that Frank Sinatra made with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, I was surprised to learn that Frank had wanted to make such a recording with the Duke as early as 1942 - 25 years earlier!

And, although there was a “Billy” involved as the arranger of music on this recording, it wasn’t the usual “Billy” associated with Ellington, as in Strayhorn, but rather Billy May!!

And May’s favorite edition of the Ellington orchestra was the famous - wait for it - [Jimmy] Blanton-[Ben] Webster aggregation which was together from 1940-1942!!!

The source for all of this information is Will Friedwald’s Sinatra! The Song Is You [1995] and there are many more insights about the Sinatra-Ellington project and its history in the following excerpts from Will’s definitive book on Sinatra and “The Singer’s Art.”

“Swing Along with Me/Sinatra Swings worked out so well that it outfoxed itself. It was so good, there was no topping it, leaving Reprise content with one Frank Sinatra-Billy May album in the catalogue while Sinatra concentrated on projects with Sy Oliver, Neil Hefti, Robert Farnon, and others. Sinatra, as head of Reprise, kept May busy with, among other things, an album with Ethel Merman, and while there never was a subsequent Sinatra-May set, the two men worked on numerous odds and ends together. … 

In the fall of 1967, either Bill Miller [Sinatra’s pianist] or producer Sonny Burke notified May that Reprise wanted him to do another album with Sinatra. This one was to use the orchestra of Duke Ellington and would eventually be released as Francis A. & Edward K., May was selected not only for his familiarity with the idiosyncratic voices of both halves of the proposed equation but because of his reputation as a musical mimic. "Billy May can write any way, like anyone," claimed trumpeter Zeke Zarchy. "If you say you want a Duke Ellington arrangement or a this-guy arrangement, Billy can write like that. But he also can write like himself." (May had previously recreated the sounds of Jimmie Lunceford and Kay Kyser for Capitol and would later re-record virtually the entire swing era for Time-Life Records.)

The idea of May writing for Ellington was as much a surprise for Sinatra as it was for May. On some level he had been considering a collaboration with Ellington for at least twenty years, but when he began planning the Ellington album in earnest in the early Reprise years, he assumed that Billy Strayhorn, Ellington's composing and arranging partner of twenty-eight years, would handle the orchestrations. But after years of illness, Strayhorn, who was only a month older than Sinatra, died on May 31, 1967. (Supposedly, Sinatra paid part of his medical expenses.) Plans for the album continued, however, and Sinatra and Burke switched from one Billy to another. Far from resenting being second choice, May remembered, "I felt very flattered that they asked me after Billy died."

May's relationship with Strayhorn, who had also grown up in Pittsburgh, went back even before Strayhorn went to work with Ellington. "I started my professional career at a little place on Station Street in Pittsburgh called Charlie Ray's," Strayhorn once reminisced. "They had a little place upstairs, and the bandstand was about a flight and a half up. Billy May used to come to this place and play trumpet and trombone. He would come up and sit with us in our little nest. We were up above the room in a little bandstand, above the steps. They used to throw people down the steps every night, unruly people."

When May went to work for Charlie Barnet at the end of 1938, he discovered that the leader was such an obsessive Ellington devotee, he could not have learned more about Ellington's music had he apprenticed with the Duke himself. In his two years with Barnet, he scored a number of Ellington items, including "In a Mizz," "Rockin' in Rhythm," "The Sergeant Was Shy," "Ring Dem Bells," and "Merry Go Round," that were faithful both to their sources and Barnet's burgeoning style. While with Glenn Miller, May conceived of a brilliantly Millerized treatment of "Take the A Train" that wrapped Strayhorn's melody in Miller's patented clarinet-led reeds. (May's later "Say It Isn't So" detours unexpectedly through "A Train" 's piano solo and countermelody.)

"Duke was a big influence on me since the days I was with Barnet," said May. "He was such a pioneer, you know. He really did amazing things. I have records of Duke's from the '30s, and God! They're doing things that some of these modern bop guys are just doing now." 

In the early '50s when he launched the Billy May Orchestra, first in the studios and then on the road, May's primary inspirations were Ellington and the two-beat sound of the then-defunct Jimmie Lunceford band, as masterminded for Lunceford by future Dorsey-Sinatra arranger Sy Oliver. When May later related to Oliver how influential he had been, "Sy told me that Duke was a big influence on him and that he actually got that [Lunceford] sound from Duke. There are some two-beat things that Duke did, and he just didn't follow up on it. But Sy told me that's where he got the idea." The two-beat "All I Need Is the Girl" on Francis A. & Edward K. illustrates the myriad connections between the sounds of Ellington, Oliver, and May.

Sinatra first met Ellington in about the spring or summer of 1942. "He was with Tommy Dorsey," Ellington later wrote. "They all came down to the College Inn at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago where we were playing, and I think it was just about the time he was ready to split the Dorsey gig. I could tell that by the way Tommy said good night to him!" Always one for fancy handles, Ellington seems to have perpetually referred to the singer as "Francis." Sinatra had also already become friends with Al Hibbler, who in May 1943 became the major male vocalist of the Ellington band.

In the fall of '42, Sinatra and Ellington crossed paths again when Sinatra, by that time playing as a single, shared a movie theater bill with the Ellington band at the State in Hartford, Connecticut. "I played three days at a theater in Hartford when Ellington was there," Sinatra later recalled, "and believe me, it was one of the biggest kicks of my life." Both were to enjoy major triumphs within a few months, Sinatra at his breakthrough New York Paramount booking that December, and Ellington at his premier Carnegie Hall concert a few weeks later.

Ellington and Sinatra couldn't have spent much time together offstage during the Hartford engagement because the composer was furiously struggling between shows to finish the forty-five-minute Black, Brown and Beige in time for Carnegie Hall. The film was the noir classic The Cat People, and Ellington later quipped to aide Stanley Dance that he wasn't sure which had the greater impact on his muse while he wrote this pivotal piece, Sinatra or The Cat People. When Ellington guested on Sinatra's Broadway Bandbox program later in 1943," BB&B was a subject of their banter. [Ellington did not play behind Sinatra on that early meeting; he hadn't brought his band along and performed instead as a featured soloist accompanied by the Raymond Scott-Axel Stordahl orchestra.]. However, Sinatra and Ellington possibly did work together informally. Later that year; as Billy Strayhorn remembered in 1962, Sinatra would occasionally sit in with the Ducal aggregation during their stay at New York's Hurricane Club.

Sinatra's love for Ellington's music was well known, although he rarely attempted to combine the Duke's ideas with his own. Sinatra recorded far fewer songs by Ellington than he did, say, by Walter Donaldson. Only two Ellington tunes appear on the classic Sinatra Capitol albums, "Mood Indigo" on In the Wee Small Hours and "I Got It Bad" on A Swingin’ Affair. In the Reprise period, only "I'm Beginning to See the Light" (like "I Didn't Know About You," done on an aircheck in the mid-1940s) turns up, on the 1962 Sinatra and Swingin' Brass. In 1955, Sinatra and Nelson Riddle also recorded a Capitol single of "How Could You Do a Thing Like That to Me?," a pop tune by Ellingtonian Tyree Glenn based on the melody of the 1947 "Sultry Serenade," which the trombonist had written and performed with Ellington.

Sinatra's attempt at Strayhorn's best-known vocal ballad, "Lush Life," which he bit off at the overloaded Felix Slatkin session for Only the Lonely, 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 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."

Sinatra had expressed interest in recording with Duke Ellington as early as 1947. At the conclusion of the "Body and Soul"/ "I'm Glad There Is You" session of November 9 of that year, Sinatra and CBS producer George Avakian were making small talk when Avakian informed Sinatra that Ellington would be recording in the same studio two days later. Sinatra then said something to the effect of "You know, I've always wanted to make a record with Duke." Avakian, a keen fan of both men, summarily brought Sinatra's idea to Manie Sachs, but the A&R chief wasn't particularly interested. "As great as Duke was, he wasn't selling a lot of records for us at that time," said Avakian. "Manie realized that Ellington was important and that he should be on the label, but he didn't give him a lot of attention." 

Sinatra and Ellington formally began doing business together in 1962, when the Maestro switched from a contract with Columbia to a handshake agreement with Sinatra and Reprise. Ellington recorded almost as prolifically for the company as Sinatra did in the next three years (a fact that only a discographer might be aware of, since the Ellington Reprise albums have been reissued only on other labels, primarily Atlantic and Discovery). As early as 1964, the label announced a forthcoming Sinatra-Ellington album. [Mosaic Records subsequently issued a 5 CD boxed set of Duke Ellington: The Reprise Studio Recordings MD5 193 in 1999].

Sinatra had already recorded with a number of Ellingtonians, including Juan Tizol, Willie Smith, and Al Sears. Three of Duke's men appear with Sinatra on the 1946 Metronome All-Stars date: Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown, and Harry Lanney. In 1960, tenor great Ben Webster recorded the first ever Reprise album, and in 1962 he solos on "Beginning to See the Light." on Sinatra and Swinging Brass.

Sinatra made a point of giving Ellington the same creative autonomy he sought for himself in founding the label, and he also granted Ellington license to produce sessions by other artists whose work he deemed worthy, resulting in the first American release by the South African piano great Dollar Brand. The output of Sinatra and Ellington ran along parallel lines when The Concert Sinatra and The Symphonic Ellington were recorded on two different continents in February 1963. Commercial considerations impacted equally on both artists, as could be witnessed on releases such as Sinatra '65 and Ellington '65, and on occasions when both were importuned to record Beatles songs. In 1966, Sinatra arranged for Ellington to write the score to his film Assault on a Queen.

Adding Ellington to his label was one way in which Sinatra could, eventually, incorporate the Ellington sound into his own work. Another was by hiring Strayhorn himself. According to David Hajdu, author of the forthcoming first biography of Strayhorn, one of the arranger-composer's roommates recalls that Sinatra called Strayhorn several times in the early 60s, offering him the chance to do some work for Reprise, both for Sinatra and, presumably, to make records under his own name. However, Ellington himself was always overly protective of his most crucial collaborator, sometimes in ways that could be construed as furthering his own interests over Strayhorn's. He soon got wind of Sinatra's offer and squelched it, not by ordering Strayhorn not to accept, but by overloading him with so much work that he could never consider outside offers.

Sinatra also attempted to get Strayhorn on his team through Al Hibbler, who had left the Ellington organization in 1951 for a successful solo career. After a series of hit singles and excellent albums for Decca, Hibbler's career was gradually running out of steam by 1960, thanks partially to his breaking from his former manager and partially to his involvement with the civil rights movement. However, Sinatra realized that a new Hibbler album, with state-of-the-art production and ace arrangements (by Gerald Wilson), could have financial as well as musical merit, and personally called Hibbler to suggest such a project in 1961.

And he still wanted Strayhorn. Hibbler remembers, "When I went with Sinatra to Reprise, Frank asked me, 'Can you get Strayhorn?' I said 'I doubt it, man!' I asked Strayhorn, and Strayhorn went and told Duke. Hibbler continued, "Duke came to me and said, 'Man I don't appreciate you trying to take my arranger! You took what you could get from me, and now you're trying to break up my band!" I said, 'No, I wouldn't do that.'"

This might have been the incident that provoked Ellington into leaving Reprise in 1965. "They weren't too close, because Duke always accused Frank of trying to take Billy Strayhorn from him," says Hibbler "and he accused me of trying to help him." For the remaining nine years of his life, Ellington became a free agent contractually, producing his own sessions, as in effect he always had, and selling the masters to whatever outfit was interested. He would record only one more album for Reprise, and that was Francis A. & Edward K.

All this was in the background when Billy May began working on the arrangements for the album in 1967, beginning as always by setting the keys with Bill Miller for the eight tunes already selected by Sinatra and Sonny Burke. In addition to a series of singles with guest vocalists as worthy as Bing Crosby in 1932 and as bizarre as Johnnie Ray in 1958, Ellington had done two ground-breaking albums with Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald. Both the Clooney and Fitzgerald projects had been Songbook albums of all Ellington-Strayhorn compositions, and Sinatra might have gone that route had Strayhorn been alive. But just as Sinatra wanted May to provide a bridge between the Ellington universe and his own, he chose a mixture of old and new (largely non-Ellington) songs that fit a middle ground. Sinatra rarely chose to duplicate what other singers had done before him and wasn't a believer in the Songbook concept to begin with.

Sinatra and May restricted the song selections to eight extra-long tracks, leaving plenty of room for the imaginations of both May mid his soloists — Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Paul Gonsalves, Lawrence Brown, and the rest — to stretch out. Sinatra and Burke selected only one overtly commercial number, the Bobby Neff hit "Sunny," graced primarily by Harry Carney's endlessly resonant baritone sax lines.

Around the third week of November, May and Miller flew up to Seattle, where Ellington was working to try out the charts in a rehearsal without Sinatra. "We rehearsed them all afternoon and, Jesus, the rehearsal was terrible," said May. "They were all terrible sight readers in that band. The drummer, Sam Woodyard, couldn't read music at all. But they had a trick where he had to watch one of the saxophone player's feet for when he'd stop playing and when he'd start. So the second time through, the saxophone player would mark his part, and he'd move his foot or something, and that would be the cue for the drummer. It was all shit like that."

Most of the studio men whom Sinatra, May, and Riddle were used to working with had all spent time with the touring swing bands. Still, in the studios it was just as important to be able to read a piece of music as if it were a newspaper as it was to be able to play with a strong swing feeling, for a Sinatra sideman anyway. However, Ellington's sidemen didn't learn Ellington's music by reading it, said May, "they got it by playing every night, and when they got it, it was fine." Many of the finest improvisors couldn't have made the studio grade, reading-wise. Harry Edison was an exception, and he has noted that in the beginning Riddle was especially generous in helping him with his sight reading.

"We went through the whole album, we rehearsed it all," May continued. "Duke made a big issue out of saying to me, “Oh, get the music ready and we'll rehearse it. We'll play these on the job. I'll play Frank's vocal part on the piano.'" May and Miller attended the band's performance that night, and when Ellington began culling May's charts, they assumed he was going to keep his word. "Well, they have two weeks before the session," May recalled thinking as he and Miller flew back to Los Angeles that night. "If they keep playing them every night like that, they're bound to nail 'em, and everything'll be alright."

However, the Ellington organization was not only the greatest amalgamation of soloing and composing talent the jazz world has known, it was also a band of prima donnas who could only be held together by the biggest ego of them all. Each of Ellington's major players had the talent, the star power, and the reputation to be a leader in his own right. Cootie Williams and Johnny Hodges had been leading groups of their own for years, and many must have felt that only the color of their skins was keeping them sidemen, virtually anonymous. As Mel Tonne had learned in a disastrous tandem billing at New York's Basin Street East, the Duke and his men typically invested energy only in playing Ellington and Strayhorn's own music. 

Torme's and May's accounts agree that the band just didn't care to put any effort into the work of outside arrangers; they just didn't care. As May put it, "The older Duke got, the more full of [himself] he became."

The session began on December 11. "I guess it was kind of in doubt as to whether all of the band would show up," engineer Lee Hirschberg recalled. "The guys would have been playing the night before, and maybe having a few drinks, or whatever. So the first day was kind of up in the air as to whether we would get anything done or not. I don't think the guys in the band started arriving until about forty-five minutes after the session started."

At the podium, from the first downbeat on, May realized that "they never touched the charts again; they never even looked at 'em after that day." He reflected, "The best big band that Duke ever had, in my estimation, was about 1940 to 1942 when he had just added the fifth saxophone and got Ben Webster. That's what I tried to write for, to go for that sound. But by 1967 it was completely gone, they had started to go to pot although they still had that distinctive sound."

May's solution was to add a couple of "ringers" to the band, reading studio men who could follow the charts and play in the Ellington style. With one good reader playing lead for each of the sections, the others could gradually follow and get it right. In addition to Al Porcino on trumpet, that also involved replacing "The Piano Player," as Ellington referred to himself. While Ellington did perform on several numbers, so did Jimmy Jones, who was both a great accompanist and an amazing Ellington impersonator. Milt Raksin, a Hollywood pianist best remembered for his work with the bands of Gene Krupa and Tommy Dorsey, also filled in on different numbers.

"You never saw such completely disconnected people in your life," observed Milt Bernhart, who happened to be playing a date in the adjoining studio. "There was Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves, and they were thinking about what they were going to have for dinner that night — everything else but this. It had reached Frank, too. He wasn't really thrilled. At that point somebody wheeled in his birthday cake. It turned out it was his birthday."

Part of the problem was also Sinatra himself. He was not in his best voice that week and sounds too thin in some spots and overly heavy in others, and he also hits an occasional flat note (like the plaintively whining last note on "Come Back to Me"). Sinatra doubtless realized he wasn't operating up to his usual technical standards, and probably, if this had been any other occasion, he would have postponed the dates. But realizing the impossible logistics of getting both himself and the Ellington band in the same studio at the same time, he decided to go through with it. He also had the option of recording orchestral tracks for himself to overdub vocals at a later date, but he might have been aware that hoth the Clooney and Fitzgerald albums with Ellington had been over-dubbed, and realized that they suffered because of it.

Besides, what makes Francis A. & Edward K. a success is how Sinatra works with the Ellingtonians, in a way that could have been captured only with them all in the same room at the same time. Once the sessions began in earnest, Sinatra, May, Ellington, and the studio and regular band members put their egos behind them and got to work. It finally didn't matter that their collective sight-reading skills weren't up to snuff. As engineer Lee Hirschberg stated, "They were just such an incredible hand, it was like they were joined at the base of the skull by some invisible thing. They just locked into everything. It was an amazing session, really."

"That was a hard album, and there's some disastrous shit in there," May put it, "but some of it's awful good." The disc starts with "Follow Me," from Camelot, the musical fable that titled a political era in which Sinatra had played no small part. Years earlier, Sinatra and Riddle had heralded the coming of this "brief shining moment" with "High Hopes," for which the singer had commissioned a new, pro-Kennedy libretto from the original lyricist, Sammy Cahn, as an election jingle. In 1961, to commemorate the coronation of "the wisest, most heroic, most splendid king who ever sat on any throne," Sinatra sang "That Old Jack Magic" around the same time that he and May rerecorded Johnny Mercer's original text for Come Swing with Me. The assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 announced the end of that "fleeting wisp of glory known as Camelot," and Sinatra and Ellington anticipated that, too, with the melancholy "Follow Me."

That chart's languid pace and bluish mood set the tone for the album. The Clooney and Fitzgerald sets had proffered a mixture of fast and slow numbers, but Sinatra, who prefers a more consistent tone, decided to concentrate on torpid tempi. That this is one of Sinatra's few slow sets not put together entirely of suicide songs makes it the most erotic of all Sinatra albums; like Ellington Indigos, here is the perfect inspiration for really close slow dancing. Yet at this hardly horse race speed, as May said, "'Follow Me' swings like hell!'

And, apart from being the rare Sinatra LP to mix new and old tunes, Francis A. contains what might be his most concentrated singing. Whether it was the newness of the setting or because he was afraid of missing notes, Sinatra bears down with a super tight intensity. Instead of sounding unrelated—in fact, he's quite loose on “All I Need Is the Girl"—he sounds more keenly centered than ever. For the first time since the '40s he abstains from familiar Frankisms such as "baby" and "jack" and throws in hardly any of his ad hoc lyric alterations.

The only Ellington original out of the eight, "I Like the Sunrise," had been written for Al Hibbler to sing at the start of the composer's 1947 The Liberian Suite, which he had composed in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the first African republic founded by freed slaves. With its allusions to emancipation, "I Like the Sunrise" was an appropriate aria for a fading Camelot, and Sinatra sings it with reverential majesty, although he supposedly phoned Hibbler after the session and told him, "You're the only guy in the world who can sing that goddamned thing!"

Francis A. & Edward K. features other examples of the kind of pieces that Sinatra and May and Ellington liked to dabble with, as in the exotic contemporary Latin American "Yellow Days" and "Poor Butterfly." May captures the Ellington sound to a "T" throughout, but despite his intentions it's the great 1967 band's texture he pinpoints rather than the more widely celebrated edition of 1942. He really gets it down on "Yellow Days," which contains an instrumental chorus that, after a stunning Johnny Hodges solo, seems to take the band off on a tangent resembling one of the original D or E sections Ellington frequently wrote into his pieces (thereby transcending standard song form) but which is actually based on composer Alvaro Carillo's melody and harmony. "Butterfly," a more directly Puccini-inspired 1916 forerunner to "South of the Border," tells yet another tale of an American Pinkerton loving and leaving a femme foreigner, with Sinatra leaping into a higher and more powerful second chorus.

The track most frequently cited as the album's masterpiece bears another quasi-exotic reference in its title, "Indian Summer"—a cut May described as "just outstanding." When asked to name his favorite arrangement for Sinatra, Nelson Riddle selected "Indian Summer," citing it as the only chart he wished he had written. The beauty of the piece is its simplicity; it never attracts attention to itself or the ensemble but functions as a velvety background for Sinatra and Johnny Hodges, who contributes one of the most sensual solos of his life. Milt Bernhart remembers it as "the only thing really good that happened" on the date: "Hodges played that alto solo in the middle, and it's really quintessential Johnny Hodges."

Bernhart has explained that Sinatra and his musicians usually had an unspoken empathy, preferring not to blow their cools; only if a soloist played something really extraordinary would Sinatra offer more than one or two complimentary words. The most enthusiastic Bernhart ever saw Sinatra get was after the playback of "Indian Summer": "He said, 'My God! That's unbelievable, John.'" Hodges, as usual, said nothing.

Sinatra bookends Francis A. with key songs from consecutive Alan Jay Lerner shows, concluding with the set's one out-and-out uptempo, "Come Back to Me" (he had already recorded "On a Clear Day" from the same score). For this hard and fast number, May turned for inspiration to Ellington's famous "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," first written and recorded in 1937 and spectacularly revived at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. Although May has insisted that he likes "the old version better because there's some really nice clarinet things," he features Paul Gonsalves here, remembering the tenorist who drove the crowd wild at Newport with twenty-seven spontaneous choruses as, to say the least, "an exciting player."

Apart from Gonsalves' soaring statement, "Come Back to Me" has Sinatra and the band racing and roaring and rocking in rhythm, the muted trumpets wa-wa-ing in double time and the brass skyrocketing into proto-Kenton dissonances. May concludes with a stuttering stop-and-start finish reminiscent of Ellingtonian train portraits like "Daybreak Express" and "Happy Go Lucky Local," thus ending a generally blue-tinged album on an upbeat note. By the time the train winds to a halt, you know you've been on a breathtaking ride, and you walk away convinced that for all the mishegoss that went into it, you've just listened to a great album.

The overall experience clearly was not a magical one for either Ellington or Sinatra; neither, to the best of my knowledge, ever cited it as a career highlight. In his 1973 collection of reminiscences, Music Is My Mistress, Ellington praised Sinatra for his '40s campaign against racial intolerance and also for rallying to his support once in the '50s when several of his bandsmen were caught in a gambling raid that the papers threatened to blow into a big scandal. He also mentioned a "recent" occasion on which he had again surprised Sinatra on his birthday by showing up at his party and bringing his band with him. But he didn't mention Francis A. & Edward K..”