"Sophisticated Lady" | |
---|---|
Single by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra | |
Released | 1933 |
Recorded | February 15, 1933 |
Genre | Jazz |
Songwriter(s) | Duke Ellington |
"Sophisticated Lady" is a jazz standard, composed as an instrumental in 1932 by Duke Ellington.
Additional credit is given to publisher Irving Mills whose words were added to the song by Mitchell Parish. The words met with approval from Ellington, who described them as "wonderful—but not entirely fitted to my original conception". That original conception was inspired by three of Ellington's grade-school teachers. "They taught all winter and toured Europe in the summer. To me that spelled sophistication." [1] [2] It has also been suggested that the title refers to his longtime companion, Mildred Dixon. [3]
Lawrence Brown, the trombone player in Ellington's band at the time, claimed that he was responsible for the main hook in the A section of the tune. Ellington paid him $15 for his contribution, but he was never officially credited. [4]
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra introduced "Sophisticated Lady" in 1933 [5] [2] with an instrumental recording of the song that featured solos by Toby Hardwick on alto sax, Barney Bigard on clarinet, Lawrence Brown on trombone and Ellington on piano. The recording entered the charts on 27 May 1933 and rose to number three. [6] [2]
Singer Adelaide Hall recorded with Ellington in 1927, 1932, and 1933, [7] but only recorded two versions of "Sophisticated Lady", in 1944 (with Phil Green And His Rhythm) [8] and in 1976, on her album Hall of Ellington. [9] The song appeared on the soundtrack of the 1989/90 documentary celebrating her life entitled Sophisticated Lady. [10] In his autobiography Music Is My Mistress, Ellington writes that "George Gershwin once told Oscar Levant that he wished he had written the bridge to Sophisticated Lady, and that made me very proud". [11]
Charles Mingus Jr. was an American jazz upright bassist, composer, bandleader, pianist, and author. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history, with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Eric Dolphy. Mingus's work ranged from advanced bebop and avant-garde jazz with small and midsize ensembles to pioneering the post-bop style on seminal recordings like Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) and Mingus Ah Um (1959) and progressive big band experiments such as The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963).
Jazz standards are musical compositions that are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners. There is no definitive list of jazz standards, and the list of songs deemed to be standards changes over time. Songs included in major fake book publications and jazz reference works offer a rough guide to which songs are considered standards.
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"In a Sentimental Mood" is a jazz composition by Duke Ellington. He composed the piece in 1935 and recorded it with his orchestra during the same year. Lyrics were written by Manny Kurtz; Ellington's manager Irving Mills gave himself a percentage of the publishing, so the song was credited to all three. Other popular versions in 1935/36 were by Benny Goodman and by Mills Blue Rhythm Band. The opening notes of the song's melody resemble Gershwin's 1926 "Someone To Watch Over Me".
"C Jam Blues" is a jazz standard composed in 1942 by Duke Ellington and performed by countless other musicians, such as Dave Grusin, Django Reinhardt, Oscar Peterson, and Charles Mingus.
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"Laura" is a 1945 popular song. The music, composed by David Raksin for the 1944 movie Laura, which starred Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, is heard frequently in the movie. The film's director, Otto Preminger, had originally wanted to use Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" as the theme, but Raksin was not convinced that it was suitable. Angered, Preminger gave Raksin one weekend to compose an alternative melody. Raksin later said, and maintained for the rest of his days, that when, over that weekend, his wife sent him a "Dear John" letter, the haunting theme seemed to write itself.
"(In My) Solitude" is a 1934 composition by Duke Ellington, with lyrics by Eddie DeLange and Irving Mills. It has been recorded numerous times and is considered a jazz standard.
But Beautiful is an album of pop standards by Boz Scaggs, released in 2003. It reached number one on the Billboard Top Jazz Albums chart in 2004.
"Creole Love Call" is a 1927 jazz standard by Duke Ellington, Bubber Miley and Rudy Jackson. The song is associated with vocalist Adelaide Hall. The song entered the Billboard USA song charts in 1928 at No. 19.
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By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was replaced with a tendency towards calm and smoothness, with the sounds of cool jazz, which favoured long, linear melodic lines. It emerged in New York City, as a result of the mixture of the styles of predominantly white swing jazz musicians and predominantly black bebop musicians, and it dominated jazz in the first half of the 1950s. The starting point were a series of singles on Capitol Records in 1949 and 1950 of a nonet led by trumpeter Miles Davis, collected and released first on a ten-inch and later a twelve-inch as the Birth of the Cool. Cool jazz recordings by Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet usually have a "lighter" sound which avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop. Cool jazz later became strongly identified with the West Coast jazz scene, but also had a particular resonance in Europe, especially Scandinavia, with emergence of such major figures as baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin and pianist Bengt Hallberg. The theoretical underpinnings of cool jazz were set out by the blind Chicago pianist Lennie Tristano, and its influence stretches into such later developments as Bossa nova, modal jazz, and even free jazz. See also the list of cool jazz and West Coast musicians for further detail.
In the early 1940s in jazz, bebop emerged, led by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and others. It helped to shift jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging "musician's music." Differing greatly from swing, early bebop divorced itself from dance music, establishing itself more as an art form but lessening its potential popular and commercial value. Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it used faster tempos. Beboppers introduced new forms of chromaticism and dissonance into jazz; the dissonant tritone interval became the "most important interval of bebop" and players engaged in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation which used "passing" chords, substitute chords, and altered chords. The style of drumming shifted as well to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the ride cymbal was used to keep time, while the snare and bass drum were used for accents. This appealed to a more specialized audiences than earlier forms of jazz, with sophisticated harmonies, fast tempos and often virtuoso musicianship. Bebop musicians often used 1930s standards, especially those from Broadway musicals, as part of their repertoire. Among standards written by bebop musicians are Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" (1941) and "A Night in Tunisia" (1942), Parker's "Anthropology" (1946), "Yardbird Suite" (1946) and "Scrapple from the Apple" (1947), and Monk's "'Round Midnight" (1944), which is currently the most recorded jazz standard composed by a jazz musician. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos, uptempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie from the 1930s. Kansas City Jazz in the 1930s as exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and fellow musicians, especially established swing players, who bristled at the new harmonic sounds. To hostile critics, bebop seemed to be filled with "racing, nervous phrases". Despite the initial friction, by the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary. The most influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and drummer Max Roach.
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The Duets is a studio album by American jazz pianist Mulgrew Miller and Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. The album was recorded in Copenhagen on the Bang & Olufsen label and released in 1999. The record features famous compositions by pianist Duke Ellington as well as two originals by bandmembers. Their duo later became a trio with the occasional inclusion of drummer Alvin Queen in 2000.
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