Word: ellington
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...world last week had a good, squabblesome book to squabble over. Its publication was celebrated by a gay party at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery. Surrounded by highly explosive canvases, Duke Ellington and Kansas City's boogie-woogie specialist Pete Johnson smote the piano while esthetic arguments added to the clamor. The book: Samuel M. Kootz's New Frontiers in American Painting (Hastings House...
Cabin In The Sky (M.G.M.) is an all-star Negro musical with handsome, luscious-voiced Lena Home (TIME, Jan. 4), Ethel Waters, "Rochester," Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Hall Johnson's singers. Like many star-filled pictures, this one never really shows off its crowded heavens. The Negroes are apparently regarded less as artists (despite their very high potential of artistry) than as picturesque, Sambo-style entertainers...
...best things in the picture are a rebuke to all kinds of pretentiousness. Many in the audience will gladly settle for the dancing of the great John "Bubbles" Sublett when he takes to his hat and stick and staircase while Ellington plays his gaudy arrangement of Shine...
...John Kirby concert at Symphony Hall this Thursday doesn't seem to have any pretensions to the importance of the Ellington one, but it should be entertaining. Kirby's bunch has long since ceased to raise my blood pressure, but the rest of the program is very promising...
...Ellington keeps poking his head in, it's because he keeps making news. This time it's in the form of two fine albums of re-issue, one Victor and one Brunswick, now a Decca subsidiary. The Brunswick has the edge in quality, and the advantage of having many sides unavailable for more than ten years. "Birmingham Breakdown" is remarkable for being the only Ellington with a Dixieland breakdown ending, and "Wall Street Wail" has always been one of my favorites...