Word: ellington
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Nice last week was holding the first International Jazz Festival. Jazz fans from all over Western Europe (including G.I.s given special leave from Germany) flocked to it. In Nice's plum-plush opera house, they heard jazz from seven nations, including three brands of U.S. stuff. Ex-Ellington Trumpeter Rex Stewart and his sextet, garish in grey-green homespun and corn-yellow ties, set the joint jumping. But when Louis & his boys† burned a way through Rockin' Chair, St. Louis Blues and That's My Desire (with 200-lb. Velma Middleton rocking the lyrics), the fans...
Toni got her rhythm naturally. Her mother was once in the Cotton Club chorus, has always wanted her kids in show business. And her father, a redcap at Los Angeles' Union Station, owns a roomful of hot records-Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan. "Daddy likes to riff," says Toni sternly. "'Sometimes he keeps us awake all night." But two years ago, Toni began riffing...
...wasn't swing: toothy Stan Kenton had already pronounced that "dead, gone, finished." Some doubted that it was even jazz: it had a shifty beat (and sometimes none), little-if any-form, and even less improvisation. Most of it sounded like Duke Ellington with the D.T.s. But when Kenton's band got to pushing out such huge, screeching blotches of sound as Artistry Jumps and Message to Harlem, the fans ripped the place wide open. They listened to his newest and most pretentious masterpiece;, Prologue Suite in Four Movements, in a state of glassy somnam-bulance. When Kenton...
...Latest member of the disc jockey club was grizzled Duke Ellington, 48, who settled happily into an armchair at Manhattan's WMCA last week and contemplated his possible winnings (a reported ducal $75,000 a year, maybe more, if a hoped-for 150 stations buy his transcribed show). As a jockey, the Duke promised to be impressive: his jazz know-how gave his between-platter comments a fine mood indigo. One record, he decided, had a "pear ice cream" flavor; Songstress Sarah Vaughn was "serpentine and opalesque"; Crooner Vic Damone "caressed with satin and gave a back porch intimacy...
...voice with dust in it-singing Hurry On Down, a husky tune Nellie herself wrote. First, her piano accompanied her with knotty background chords while she sang; on a second chorus, she accompanied the piano (which she plays in a style reminiscent of the musician she most admires, Duke Ellington) with a kind of happy deedle-dee-dee whisper...