Empire Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 28 October 2012

THE STAGE of the Empire Theatre at Eden Court had sixteen outstanding musicians performing on it last Sunday evening.

FIFTEEN of them came from the Who’s Who of Scottish jazz, and the sixteenth was Edward Kennedy Ellington, better known as “Duke”. This was the last gig in a short but demanding five venue tour of Scotland by Tommy Smith and the award-winning Scottish National Jazz Orchestra with their latest feature programme, “In The Spirit Of The Duke”.

Scottish National Jazz Orchestra

The audience, including many well-kent faces to jazz regulars, was as big as any I have seen for jazz at Eden Court – just too large to be shoe-horned into the OneTouch Theatre where a three hour show would have been very uncomfortable for those of us on the corpulent side. And even at three hours, Tommy Smith’s tribute to Duke Ellington was barely able to scratch the surface of the music the great man left for posterity. It’s a nice problem to face. How do you select the thirty or so numbers from a total of over a thousand that best illustrate the genius of Ellington and at the same time provide solo spots for the panoply of musicians in the band?

Ellington’s recording career spanned over half a century, starting with the days of the old shellac 78rpm records and taking in the earlier days of the vinyl LP. Not surprisingly, nearly all the pieces played were limited to the time it took to play one side of the old gramophone record, about three minutes. Even latterly when technology would allow him to expand and develop his tunes, Ellington instead stayed with the short pieces but grouped them into suites and often arranged other composers’ music for his own band, such as the Peer Gynt Suite of Grieg’s music or the Nutcracker Suite inspired by Tchaikovsky, and extracts from these suites were well featured during the evening.

Although primarily a composer and a band leader, Ellington’s instrument was the piano, and filling the Duke’s shoes was the talented Brian Kellock, containing his personal style of playing so as to give an accurate impersonation of Duke Ellington. Sharing the engine room with Brian were Calum Gourlay on string bass and Alyn Cosker on drums. Tommy Smith himself naturally took Paul Gonsalves’s seat with tenor saxophone and enthralled with a couple of substantial solos, The Single Petal of A Rose from The Queen’s Suite towards the end of the first half, and the famous Wailing Interval between Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue.

Joining Smith in the reed section were the ever tuneful Konrad Wiszniewski on tenor, last year’s Young Jazz Musician of The Year Ruraidh Pattison on alto, and the two multi-instrumentalists Martin Kershaw and Bill Fleming. In the second row were the three trombones of Chris Grieve, Phil O’Malley and Michael Owers, with Grieve taking most of the solos, and tucked away at the back were the four trumpets of Ryan Quigley, Tom MacNiven, Cameron Jay and James Marr, with Quigley and MacNiven making frequent trips to the front of the stage to demonstrate their virtuosity, especially Quigley’s ear-splitting top Cs.

I’m in two minds whether to thank Tommy Smith or to give him a gentle slap on the wrist for his choice of programme. This was definitely a gig for the Ellington afficiandos that gave us the chance to hear live performances of several of his lesser known compositions such as Concerto for Cootie, Jack The Bear Scorpio, Oclupaca, Sepia Panorama, Harlem Air Shaft or Daybreak Express, amongst others. There were some well-known numbers, all played in perfect Ellington style, such as Caravan, Solitude, Black & Tan Fantasy, Mood Indigo and Rockin’ In Rhythm.

But if I was somebody without a particular jazz interest and I had gone along to hear a great band paying tribute to a great musician and band leader by playing some of his greatest numbers, then I would have been a bit disappointed. Where were the numbers that crossed Ellington over to the general public, such as Take The A-Train, C-Jam Blues, Satin Doll, I Got It Bad or Sophisticated Lady? Or perhaps it’s just that the evening left me in a sentimental mood.

© James Munro, 2012

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