Since the Snappy Video “Soundies” collection ran only about an hour, I followed it up with a collection of music videos by Duke Ellington from an odd compilation called The Centennial Collection, released by RCA Victor in 1999. The company decided to commemorate its 100th anniversary in business by releasing a series of discs, each by one of their most famous artists, with a CD on one side of the dual cover and a DVD on the other. The Ellington DVD consisted of the 1935 Paramount short Symphony in Black, a 1937 short called Record Making with Duke Ellington, five Ellington Soundies shot in Los Angeles in 1941, and a 1945 band short featuring Ellington’s band as it existed then. On oen of the two nights during which Turner Classic Movies featured Soundies, co-host Susan Delson noted that Ellignton’s Soundies seemed more interesting visually than others’ did. I’ve long thought that about Ellington’s band shorts as well – particularly Black and Tan (1929), directed by Dudley Murphy; and
The disc opened with Symphony n Black, and though it wasn’t as good a transfer as the one on the Kino on DVD release of the feature film New Orleans, with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, that featured shorts with those two great stars as bonus items, it was good enough to be watchable. I’ve written extensively about Symphony in Black on moviemagg before at
https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/04/symphony-in-black-paramount-1935.html, and suffice it to say that it remains a vest-pocket masterpiece, important not only in its own right (though it’s still a bit silly to see the opening shot of stevedores shoveling coal off a pristine soundstage floor) but as a sort of pencil sketch for Ellington’s symphonic masterpiece of 1943, Black, Brown and Beige. It’s also especially important as the first truly great recording made by the young Billie Holiday, who’d made her recording debut with a Benny Goodman studio band in November and December 1933. On those records, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch,” she sounds audibly nervous – and given that just before she sang “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” she had to follow Ethel Waters at the same mike obviously scared her to death (Waters’ infleunce on Billie largely remains unacknowledged, largely because they hated each other), I can readily understand her fright. By the time she recorded “Saddest Tale,” the blues song she sings in Symphony in Black, in October 1934 (some discographies give March 12, 1935, but that was the date the film was released, not when it was pre-recorded), Billie had become a full-fledged artist, a master at shading and phrasing a vocal line and already using her trademark downward glissandi – the so-called “dying falls” – to bring poingnancy and dramatic power to a song. I also suspect she was simply more comfortable with her own people than with Goodman’s white boys.
Right after Symphony in Black the disc included a 1937 short called Record Making with Duke Ellington, an odd little film that celebrated the return of the record business to economic viability (the advent of radio and the Great Depression had virtually killed it, but it had come roaring back as the overall economy recovered and the announcer tells us that 25 million records were being sold in the U.S. every year, a respectable number but far smaller that what ot would becolme with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950’s) and showed footage (accompanied by stock music, not Ellington’s) of the elaborate metallurgical processing that goes into making playable pressings out of master discs. (Though the original recordings are now made on tape or digitally instead of directly to lacquer master discs, as they were in 1937, in all other respects the process is essentially the same today.) Ellington is shown rehearsing and recording his original “Daybreak Express” and a tune called “Oh Babe, Maybe Someday,” another Ellington original (words as well as music) with Ellington’s great singer, Ivie Anderson. The tunes were recorded for Variety, an imprint of Brunswick and Vocalion created by Ellington’s then-manager, Irving Mills; he sold records by the full Ellington band on a label called Master and discs featuring small groups drawn from it on the cheaper Variety label.
The next Ellington items on the disc are his five Soundies, shot in 1941 in Los Angelles where Ellington and his band members were living while they pu9t on the musical Jump for Joy! The band perfomred two songs from Jump for Joy! on Soundies – Ivie Anderson singing “I Goit It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” and a duet called “Bli-Blip” with singer/dancers Marie Bruant and Paul White – and they are the only accounts of what this criminally under-documented show might lave looked like in live performance. Ellington’s other three Soundies include two of his own jazz instrumentals, “Cottontail” and “‘C’ Jam Blues” (rettiled “Hot Chocolate” and “Jam Session” for their Soundies incarnations) and “Flamingo,” a non-Ellington song (music by Ted Grouya, lyrics by Edmund Anderson) that becamne a major hit for him. In his book The Song Is You, Will Friedwald credited Billy Strayhorn’s arrangement for “Flamingo” and Axel Stordahl’s for “I’ll Never Smile Again,” recorded by Tommy Dorsey with his then-unknown vocalist Frank Sinatra, as fundamentally changing the parameters of writing big-band vocal arrangements – though someone else, also with a last name beginning with “S” – Eddie Sauter – had been doing that a few years earlier with his arrangements for singer Mildred Bailey in Red Norvo’s band. (Norvo and Bailey were married to each other and they were inevitably billed as “Mr. and Mrs. Swing.”)
The final film on the Ellington Centennial Collection DVD was a 1945 band short from RKO (though indb.com lists it as 1943, two years earlier) directed by JKay Bonafield. Shot at the RKO Movietone Studio in New York, it’s nothing but a plain video of Ellington’s band running through a few of their greatest hits – “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” and “Never No Lament,” an Ellington instrumental later outfitted with lyrics as “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Given how dazzlingly inventive Ellington’s previous band shorts directed by Dudley Murphy and Fred Waller had been, this is especially disappointing. It also doesn’t help tuat “It Don’t Mean a Thing” is heard here in a vocal version by Rayy Nance, a spectacular trumpeter and violinist but not that great a singer. (A lot of trumpeters, both Black and white, oif that period attemoted to be the next Louis Armstrong. None succeeded.) IN 1945 Ellingotn made a studio recording of “It Don’t Mean a Thing” featuring three women vocalists – Joya Sherrill, Kay Davis, and Marie Ellington – stunningly singing not in harmony, but in counterpoint. I remember playing that record for a friend of mine from junior college who told he he’d heard an Ellington record and thought it sounded like cocktail lounge music. “Duke ELLINGTON? COCKTAIL LOUNGE MUSIC?” I thundered, and to prove my point I played him that record and he admitted it didn’t sound ike cocktail lounge music. Incidentally, Marie Ellington was not a relative – she got that name from a brief first marriage to a Black soldier – and Duke Ellington billed her simply as “Marie” so people wouldn’t think she got the job through nepotism. Later she left the band and married Nat “King” Cole, reverting to the original spelling of h er first name – Maria – and when I read that in Duke Ellington’sautobiography, Music Is My Mistress, I thought, “No wonder Natalie Cole has such a great voice! She gets it from both sides!”
