Ellington's 'Money Jungle'

Synopsis

In 1962, American jazz composer, performer and bandleader Duke Ellington was 63 — an acknowledged master, but trends in American jazz were changing, and there were much younger figures emerging, with more challenging styles.

Take, for example, bassist Charles Mingus, Jr., a master of collective improvisation, and drummer Max Roach, a pioneer in the be-bop movement. Despite their age and stylistic differences, these three jazz titans went into a recording studio on today’s date in 1962 and, while tape rolled, using bare-bones charts provided by Ellington of melodies and harmonies, the three jazz titans improvised. The results were issued the following year as a classic LP, Money Jungle.

Despite his fame, Ellington did not have a recording contract in 1962, and, perhaps after decades experiencing the highs and lows of life as a Black jazz musician in a segregated society, Money Jungle reflects a certain bitterness. Along with the charts he gave Mingus and Roach, Ellington also provided poetic story lines for each track, like: “Crawling around on the streets are serpents who have their heads up; these are agents and people who have exploited artists. Play that along with the music.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Duke Ellington (1899-1974), Charles Mingus (1922-1979) and Max Roach (1924-2007): Money Jungle; Blue Note 31461

On This Day

Births

• 1795 - Baptismal date of Italian opera composer Saverio Mercadante, in Altamura, near Bari

• 1884 - American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes, in Elmira, New York

• 1917 - Korean-born German composer Isang Yun, in Tong Young (now Chung Mu)

Deaths

• 1179 - German mystic, writer and composer Hildegard von Bingen, 81, in Rupertsburg (near Bingen)

• 1762 - Italian violinist and composer Francesco Geminiani, 74, in Dublin

• 1803 - Austrian composer Franz Xaver Sussmayr, who studied with Salieri and Mozart. Sussmayr completed Mozart’s unfinished Requiem.

Premieres

• 1872 - American premiere of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries at a Central Park concert given by the Theodore Thomas orchestra

• 1931 - Delius: A Song of Summer, in London

• 1957 - Cowell: Persian Set, at the Gulestan Palace in Tehran, Iran, by the Minneapolis Symphony, Antal Dorati conducting

• 1982 - Steve Reich: Tehillim (orchestral version), by New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta

Others

• 1966 - German tenor Fritz Wunderlich dies at 35, from a fall in his home in Heidelberg