At 10 am on Monday, January 10th, 1927 Duke Ellington took a sextet into the studios at 28 West 44th Street, New York to record a track with a singer, Miss Evelyn Preer. The day was cold and the studio probably not much warmer, to preserve the revolving wax disc on which the recording would be cut by a needle. Very likely the performers were grouped round a single horn for the new electric process, which offered more fidelity than the primitive acoustic method it had replaced. As for the 78 rpm speed of the apparatus, that was probably worked by a similar process to the Brunswick studios over on the corner of 7th and 52nd, where an arrangement of weights and pulleys was suspended all the way from the top floor to the basement.
It was an unpromising beginning in what was, by today's standards, a neanderthal setting. The result didn't see the light of day until 40 years later - and to hear it in RCA's magnificent new 24-CD set to celebrate Ellington's centenary is to appreciate why - but it did begin an association with the company which lasted, with interruptions, for the rest of his life. And that association produced arguably the finest music of what was probably the most distinguished career in jazz. Sensibly, the RCA set has been grouped into five sections - 1927-34, 1940-42, 1944-46, The Sacred Concerts (1965/1968/ 1973) and 1966-73 - with one disc devoted to the Metronome All-Stars 40s recordings and the 1952 Seattle Concert. Not all of it is vintage stuff; even a genius can't produce masterpieces all the time. But as it charts the progress of the man of whom Miles Davis once said "all of the musicians should get down on their knees one day and thank the Duke", it all nevertheless bears the stamp of his musical personality.
Or personalities. Ellington was a musical painter who took the shapes and colours embodied in the characters and instruments of his players and added them to an ever-growing orchestral palette. It was - especially early on - a collaborative process with hit-and-miss, on-the-job training. If it caused difficulties for him when he began, in the 1930s, to tackle compositions extending beyond the usual three-to-four minutes limit of the 78 record, it must also have helped him discover himself through breaking rules of which he was, perhaps, sometimes unaware.
The famous early pieces epitomise much of this. His celebrated Creole Love Call based on Camp Meeting Blues, a tune by a New Orleans pioneer, King Oliver; Ellington used Adelaide Hall's voice instrumentally as part of dressing up his reaction to the original in novel tonal colours. From the same year, Black and Tan Fantasy, which gained the band its first taste of recording fame, was a joint effort between the leader and his great growl trumpeter, Bubber Miley; it used Miley's effects brilliantly - although the touch of Chopin at the end attracted comment. Imagine! Jazz musicians, especially black ones, knew about the classics!
Ellington's late 1920s tenure at Harlem's Cotton Club saw further development. The club seated 500 to 700 tables, the decor was Deep South colonial, with the band playing on the "verandah" of the "mansion", backing the various acts and doing their own sets between. The chorus girls had to be under 22 years, five foot six or over, able to sing and dance and look gorgeous in next to nothing; they also had to be "high yaller; nothing darker than a light olive tint". The whole scene was an inherently racist pandering of black stereotypes to an affluent white audience. Ellington, as always, kept smiling through it.
It was also a gruelling 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. stint, but it had a radio wire which broadcast the show several times a week, and Duke began to be widely noticed. He was also able to expand the band to 10 pieces. Soon it was up to 12, and the nucleus of the great orchestra was there; Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Tricky Sam Nanton, Barney Bigard, Harry Carney. The core repertoire included Ring Dem Bells, Mood Indigo (Bigard eventually had to sue Ellington for co-composer credit and royalties), Rockin'In Rhythm and Echoes of The Jungle, all of which are in the RCA set.
But there are some little-known gems, too. From 1931, It's Glory is a succession of fine solos (notably Hodges and Williams) beautifully integrated into the overall thrust of the piece, with excellent use of counter-melodies in the first chorus.
And there are two medleys, each almost eight minutes long, from early 1932, which are in stereo; apparently RCA were experimenting with a new process and recorded Ellington doing Mood Indigo/Hot and Bothered/Creole Love Call, and East St Louis Toodle-O/Lot o'Fingers/Black and Tan Fantasy. The experiment was not continued - this was Depression Era and the record business, like everything else, was in crisis - but it shows just how truly gorgeous the band must have sounded then.
Ellington parted company with RCA in the 1930s, allegedly because a recording supervisor accidentally left a mike on and was heard instructing the engineer to prepare for "some Saturday night nigger music". The official left in 1939; Ellington was back with RCA the following year for what is generally regarded as his greatest and most concentratedly productive spell.
The orchestra was now 15, with two singers, one of whom, Ivie Anderson, was probably the finest band singer Ellington ever had - her version of his Jump For Joy (with a marvellous solo by Hodges) is still definitive; it's here. Ben Webster, Lawrence Brown and Rex Stewart were added to the reed, trombone and trumpet sections, and the great bassist, Jimmy Blanton, had come on board. Within a few weeks in 1940, the band had recorded for RCA at least five masterworks - the harmonically layered Ko-Ko, the unusually structured Concerto For Cootie, Never No Lament and the driving Cottontail, and the richly textured Harlem Air-shaft.
And that's just for starters. There's also In a Mellotone, Sophisticated Lady, Billy Strayhorn's swinging Take The `A' Train, which became the band's signature tune, and his tone poem, Chelsea Bridge - for composer and pianist Strayhorn was now an essential part of the entourage - along with a host of other pieces which would be extraordinary for any other band but were commonplace for this one.
Ellington now knew how to use the remarkable array of individual instrumental voices he had - how to integrate them into suitable structures, make the most of their tonal colours, display their solo talents to the best. What he produced was unique: Strayhorn summed it up by saying his real instrument was his orchestra.
But what he could do with it therefore depended on who was in it. When he began to lose some to death, disagreement or bigger bucks elsewhere, he began to falter. There was still remarkable music - Transblucency, with Kay Davis's voice used instrumentally, parts of his Black, Brown and Beige suite, for instance - but the band business was changing and he relied on royalties from his compositions to keep his orchestra on the road.
He was also pursuing his long-time interest in extended forms, which went back to earlier pieces like Reminiscing In Tempo (not recorded for RCA and therefore not included). The Harlem Suite on the Seattle Concert is one such here, as are the three later Sacred Concerts. If they lack the freshness and some of the individual colours his former band members could have supplied, as well as a persuasive overall structure, they all have their moments. And the Sacred Concerts were just that - concerts, not necessarily suites or pieces linked by anything more than religious or literary associations.
In his final RCA period, which ended with his death in 1974, there were three outstanding albums - The Far East Suite, The Popular Duke Ellington and the lugubriously-titled valediction to Strayhorn, who had died in 1967, And His Mother Called Him Bill. There was, of course, quality in the band: the rhythm section had improved immensely when drummer Sonny Greer left at the start of the 1950s; Cootie Williams was back, trumpeter Cat Anderson was there, and the reeds were Hodges, Carney, Russell Procope, Jimmy Hamilton and Paul Gonsalves.
Whatever the arguments about his limitations with extended forms, or whether he was a true "composer" - Alec Wilder, the composer and penetrating commentator on American music, thought not, much as he loved Duke's music - or an aural painter, the music he left behind was unmistakably Ellingtonian and some of it unmistakably great.
He wrote much of it on the road - in trains, buses, cars, hotel rooms and, later, on planes. He did it in the face of the racially and economically inspired, institutionalised second-class citizenship that existed for blacks in America for most of his career. And though the music was created by a man who said he never needed inspiration, only a deadline, it was the result of a dedication to his craft and a realisation of where his roots lay that was almost religious. That much - and more - is clear from this superb RCA set.
The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (1927-1973): 24-CDs and illustrated booklet. A sampler CD of the set is also available
