Word: ellington
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Things are certainly swingteresting this month in old Beantown. Bunny Berigan opens Monday at the Marionette Room of the Hotel Brunswick with his full band and Kay Doyle as vocalist, and Duke Ellington is at the Southland. Berigan's trumpet playing is always worth hearing, and this band is supposed to be pretty good...
...this Ellington man goes, there is little this reviewer can say. His band was the only one that Gramaphone Shop listed of the jazz bands in its record catalogue. Ask any musician who has the best band, and he'll say, "Joe X--and of course, Duke...
What he is trying to do basically is to imitate Duke Ellington. Several years ago, before Barnet bad formed his present band, I heard him play, and even then he was trying to imitate the Duke's ideas. He told me then that he felt that Ellington was the greatest of the living jazz leaders, and that his music was extraordinary by anybody's standards...
...Barnet reformed his band and went into the Famous Door in New York. Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may be, Count Basic had just been in the Door and had been breaking records right and left. Barnet decided then that in addition to his imitations of the Ellington slow style, he would copy the Basie fast style...
While occasionally on numbers like "Echoes of Harlem," the band begins to sound something like Ellington, the only outstanding thing about the band is Barnet himself. His tenor sax playing on the Lester Young (Count Basie) idea is usually good, although it occasionally sounds a little like a taxi-horn on a foggy night. His alto sax work is much better, and is probably the best imitation around of Ellingtonite Johnny Hodges. All in all, it would seem to me that the slogan. "Swing and sweat with Charlie Barnet" still holds...