Duke Ellington Orchestra
Ellington in Grona Lund 1963 (Storyville 1038330)

I FIRST heard the Duke Ellington Orchestra live in 1963 on their umpteenth European tour, while at the Grand Theatre, Leeds. It was during my first year at university.

It wasn’t quite the same personnel as on the version of the orchestra that played at this concert recorded at the Grona Lund Dance Inn in Stockholm a few months earlier in June 1963, but very close — the stratospheric trumpeter Cat Anderson came in for Ray Nance, otherwise it was the same.

So this double album brought back not only Ellington’s singular genius but also the phenomenal musicianship of then bandsmen: trumpeters Nance, Cootie Williams, Swede Rolf Ericson, who joined the band at this concert and stayed, and Eddie Preston; trombonists Lawrence Brown, Chuck Connors and Buster Cooper; reedmen Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Jimmy Hamilton and Russell Procope; bassist Ernie Shepard, drummer Sam Woodyard and the Duke himself on piano. What a galaxy of troubadours!

I’ve still got the Leeds programme sold to me on a cold December night, with photos of almost all of them.

There was very little that was predictable about an Ellington concert. You knew you were going to hear Take the A Train sometime in the evening, but everything else constantly changed. On the programme at Grona Lund, for example, the Orchestra played the 20 minutes of Suite Thursday, the Duke’s musical adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel about the people of a southern Californian fishing village. The musicians weren’t expecting to play it, and as they scuffle to find their music sheets, Ellington buys a little time for them in his announcement.

The concert begins with a tune by Ellington’s collaborator and alter ego Billy Strayhorn Boo-Dah but soon moves into the ballad Laura with a beautifully serpentine tenor saxophone solo by Gonsalves. Main Stem features Nance, Hodges, Hamilton, Cooper, Gonsalves and Brown in majestic succession and Ellington plays a long and fluent preamble before the ever-recognisable theme of Take the A Train, with Nance’s flag-waving solo.

Then it is Suite Thursday and its first movement Misfit Blues. Ellington’s keys rock through Schwiphti and Hamilton’s levitating clarinet is fragilely serene in Zweet Zursday. Nance’s bowed then plucked violin is featured on the Suite’s last piece Lay-by.

On to Hamilton’s singing clarinet in Deep Purple and Silk Lace and the muted glory of Williams, who had recently come back to Ellington after a more than two-decade absence. He plays New Concerto for Cootie and Tootie for Cootie as if he had never left.

Grona Lund and its people seem transfixed as Hodges’ alto blows beauty through The Star Crossed Lovers from Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder Shakespeare suite and he stomps and swings along the familiar street of Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, down a well-trodden path.

After the interval, Ellington comes back alone, doodling on the piano through Intermission Music before Shepard joins him, then as the musicians drift back, Woodyard and Hodges join him for the ballad I Didn’t Know About You and the perennial hodges feature Jeep’s Blues before Brown blows as only Brown could all through Rose of the Rio Grande.

As in most Ellington concerts, the classic tunes come one after another. A muted Nance, Procope and Brown revive Black and Tan Fantasy of 1927, the whole orchestra surges through Rockin’ in Rhythm first waxed in 1930 after Duke has prefaced it with some boiling stride piano in Kinda Dukish, and Gonsalves makes his Scandinavian mark with a delicate, almost icicled version of 1935’s In a Sentimental Mood. Each performance as with every Ellington performance, is anything but routine: it is sheer reinvention, no matter how vintage the tune, and when the huge, guttural sound of Carney’s baritone saxophone makes its grounding contribution to Sophisticated Lady of 1933 you suddenly realise how many times he has played it, in how many theatres in the world — and each time different.

And then after Duke’s long intro to Lullaby of Birdland, something very special happens. Out of the heart and heat of the orchestral fullness comes the solo Swedish trumpet voice of Ericson, there on the earth of his own northern zone, thousands of miles away from Ellignton’s land, yet utterly attuned, completely involved, signally beautiful. It is one of jazz’s real moments, a defiance of borders, of race diference and nationality. But that was Ellington, every sound, every note.