Midnight in Paris
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ShareAfter the disappointment of Paris Blues, Ellington-Strayhorn resumed their Parisian romance with the Midnight in Paris album of 1962. Ellington recorded the tracks in New York City in January and June. Strayhorn plays piano on about half the titles.
This fine LP seems to have been packaged by Columbia Records for that era’s easy-listening dinner music market. Have you ever found Leo Chauliac’s Dinner at Maxim’s or Ray Tico’s Fiesta En Rio at a thrift shop? In the ‘60s Ellington embraced all kinds of artistically dubious projects to keep the band afloat—a Mary Poppins LP, Duke at Tanglewood with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, sessions for Reader’s Digest. The sleeve of Midnight in Paris depicts a fantasy Paris strangely not at midnight but at dawn: a fountain in a haze of blue light.
There are no new compositions apart from the otherwise unreleased Strayhorn title track, a pretty slow-paced groove for the sax section and Duke’s minimalist piano. The LP contains new versions of two Paris Blues pieces: “Guitar Amour” and the “Paris Blues” theme. There are Ellington-ized French songs such as “Under Paris Skies” and “Comme Çi Comme Ça”. Jimmy Hamilton’s performance of Charles Trenet’s tender “Que reste-t-il de nos amours?” (“I Wish You Love”) is the highlight of the record.
It’s a shame the album is not currently available on CD.
1963
The next winter in New York Ellington taped the excellent Afro-Bossa LP and a set of classic big band charts, then took the band back to Europe. As Jazz A&R director at Frank Sinatra’s Reprise Records, Ellington was free to record at his own discretion. He recorded constantly. Even so, the feverish activity in Paris in early 1963 was pretty typical for the Duke.
On 31 January he took his full band to the (empty) Salle Wagram concert hall near the Arc de Triomphe for a collaboration with the Paris Symphony. They recorded the “Dazzling Creature” movement of Night Creature (a work from 1955), as well as a concerto grosso version of the 1950 Tone Parallel to Harlem. The next night there was a gig at the Olympia on Boulevard des Capucines in the ninth arrondissement. The band performed the bulk of what was released a decade later as The Great Paris Concert. It’s one of Ellington’s best live records, as important as The Complete Legendary Fargo Concert (1940) and Ellington at Newport (1956). This makes it one of the best big band albums ever.
The band’s line-up circa 1963 was more or less stable through the ‘60s. Cootie Williams was back from 1962 after a 22-year break to complete the trumpet section of Ray Nance, Cat Anderson, and Roy Burrowes. On trombones Ellington had Lawrence Brown, Buster Cooper, and Chuck Connors. The woodwind section was unbeatable: Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Jimmy Hamilton, and Russell Procope. Ernie Shepard played bass and Sam Woodyard was the drummer.
The Great Paris Concert begins with the 1953/1930 pairing “Kinda Dukish”/“Rockin’ in Rhythm”. This medley was recorded dozens of times but never swings harder than here. For 24 bars we’re in a caravanserai as Jimmy Hamilton’s bluesy clarinet snake-charms over Duke’s syncopated comping and a trombone groove. It’s cartoon orientalism of the highest order. Cat Anderson blasts the finalé to shreds.
The Great Paris Concert works so well because it includes vintage Ellington charts as well as longer works. Johnny Hodges gets three features: “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, “The Star Crossed Lovers” from Such Sweet Thunder, and “All of Me”. Cootie Williams performs both his classic “Concerto” of 1940 as well as a fine new “Tootie for Cootie”. The other new pieces are superb, too. There’s Ellington’s “gut bucket bolero”, called “Bula” before it was retroactively renamed the title track of Afro-Bossa. There’s the great theme from the short-lived 1961 TV series The Asphalt Jungle. The ambitious side of Ellington is represented by the full Suite Thursday from 1960 (inspired by the nearly eponymous Steinbeck novel) and the band version of the Tone Parallel to Harlem.
The band toured Western Europe through February (tracks from some of these concerts feature on a Pablo record called In The Uncommon Market). At various stops Ellington continued to contract local symphonies to record his long-prepared orchestral works—or if there was nothing at hand, something more spontaneous like La Scala, She Too Pretty To Be Blue. These jazz/classical hybrid pieces would eventually be released on The Symphonic Ellington LP.
By the 22nd Duke was back in Paris. Over the next few weeks he was involved in a spate of recording. Ellington invited Stéphane Grappelli and Svend Asmussen into Barclay studios to meet with his own star Ray Nance for a Jazz Violin Session. Another full band concert at the Olympia added the final tracks to The Great Paris Concert album and furnished another LP’s worth of live Greatest Hits. On the marathon night of the 24th Ellington produced an LP (A Morning In Paris) with the South African singer Sathima Bea Benjamin and supervised the first LP by her husband Abdullah Ibrahim (Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio). He’d met the couple on tour in Zurich. At the end of the month Ellington invited Swedish singer Alice Babs to Studio Hoche to record 15 tracks with a small ensemble. That album was later released as Serenade to Sweden.
It had been a busy tour. Most of these sessions were not released till years later.
Back in New York that April a reduced version of the band took part in another of Ellington’s self-funded recording sessions. Duke and Strayhorn each debuted a new tune apparently inspired by their recent Paris adventure and featuring Ray Nance on cornet. Ellington’s “Bloussons Noir”, named for the youth subculture in France (the Black Jackets), is a gentle blues chart led by Ernie Shepherd’s fluttering bassline. Strayhorn’s “Elysee” is a mid-tempo gallic dance melody with a close woodwind arrangement in a high register. After Nance’s introductory melody, Paul Gonsalves solos.
Typically, “Bloussons Noir” and “Elysee” were never revisited. Their first release came posthumously in 1986 on The Private Collection Vol. 7.
1965 and 1966
Much less known but an equal contender for the title of Duke’s Great Paris Concert is a two-CD set called En Concert Avec Europe 1. This recording is drawn from radio broadcasts from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in late January 1965. It’s a perfect compliment to the 1963 concert because it hardly duplicates material.
Once again ambitious works sit alongside the obligatory ‘30s classics. The album contains the entire Black movement of Black, Brown and Beige (1943) as well as an early version of Ad Lib on Nippon. Harry Carney’s baritone sax features on ‘Sophisticated Lady’; circular breathing lets him extend his final note into eternity. Ray Nance blasts through “Perdido” with a quote from “The Donkey Serenade”.
On 25 February 1966 Ellington performed a solo piano concert at the opening of the restored Château de Goutelas in Loire in the south of France. He played New World A-Comin’. The experience was so inspiring that Ellington composed a Goutelas Suite, recorded in April of 1971 and released posthumously. The suite is a bit of a hodge-podge, but the movement “Something” is a major late period work, with its close ensemble writing for the flutes of Norris Turney and Harold Minerve.
Billy Strayhorn died on 31 May 1967. Ellington would continue to tour Paris almost annually. The French were ever-more rapturous in their adulation, awarding the Légion d’Honneur in 1973, a year before Ellington died.
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Read “Duke Ellington and Paris Part 2: An Interview with Laurent Mignard”, director of the Duke Orchestra in Paris. This world-class repertory big band performed a sell-out concert at the Alhambra Theatre in March 2011.
