Do-do-dooo-do, do-do-dooo-do, do-do-do-do-do

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

02/04/61 : The Nutcracker Suite - Duke Ellington

Our first visit with Sir Duke - I'm expecting a big band sound and for it to be well done, but not really my kind of thing. I am intrigued as to why it's called The Nutcracker Suite though - I assume Tchaikovsky is involved somewhere, but I don't quite see how that will work.

Well I recognised some of the tunes as classical numbers given a very up-to-date big band sound, so I assumed as least some were by Pyotr Illyich - but I was quite surprised when Wikipedia told me that they were all from The Nutcracker Suite, with updated arrangements by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. They're all actually really well done with "Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy)" being particularly impressive. The sound quality is also top notch - considerably better than most we've seen this year. This was a bit of fun, but it was really well done fun and I enjoyed it - a very pleasant surprise indeed.

We're at #11 on the chart this week with a new entry - it disappeared for a week, came back for a week and that was its lot!  The top five this week were Elvis, South Pacific, George, The Everly Brothers and Cliff and we have a new entry for the Victory At Sea soundtrack (#12), which was a TV series about the naval battles of World War II - I'm sure it was all very stirring.

Wikipedia has one whole sentence on the album which I've already given you all the information from.  Duke's entry tells us that he had a thirty year partnership with Billy Strayhorn and there's loads of really interesting stuff in there on the man - but the thing that tickled me most was that his childhood piano teacher was called Marietta Clinkscales.

"Customers also listened to" a load of albums featuring Duke Ellington - and I have to admit that he's been a bit of a blind spot for me up to this point, but I was really impressed by this so might make an effort to check out more of his stuff.

26/03/61 - One of his better efforts
09/04/61 - A most peculiar album

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more