Hot Ambassador

In the autumn, Europe's leading conductors cross the Atlantic to direct U. S. symphony orchestras through the formal winter concert season. In the summer, U. S. jazz bands go to Europe to demonstrate in music halls and night clubs their country's one & only original contribution to music. Europe in the past few summers has heard smooth, suave jazz played by Paul Whiteman, Rudy Vallee, Guy Lombardo. It has also heard Negro syncopators who scorn sweet stereotype melodies and easy orthodox rhythms. But this summer Europeans will have a chance to hear hot, pulsing jazz played as they never have heard it before. Last week on the S. S. Olympic Negro Edward Kennedy (''Duke") Ellington sailed with his 14-piece all-Negro band to play in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, later on the Continent.

When an authentic history of hot jazz is written it will include the name of a legendary Buddy Bolden, a Negro trumpeter from the Rampart Street section of New Orleans who as long ago as 1910 persisted in interpolating wild, melancholy notes not written in his scores. He ended in an insane asylum. The jazz history will also tell about William Christopher Handy who brought "St. Louis Blues" north from Memphis, and about the Negro bands whose frenzied improvisations took the Barbary Coast by storm, inspired Paul Whiteman, Ted Lewis and countless other white-skinned imitators.

But real "hot" jazz will be shown as coming from Negro performers like mad Buddy Bolden--free-lance trumpeters, saxophonists and trombone players who started the hot jazz cult which today has such heroes as Cab Galloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington. Galloway and Armstrong are predominantly showmen. Galloway plays no instrument, sings with his orchestra in a bleating, high-pitched voice, relies partly for his effects on his white dress-suit with ludicrously long tails. Windy, muggle-smoking Louis Armstrong has never had patience or skill to build an orchestra of his own. He is happy strutting before any good hot band where he can introduce himself as "The Reverend Satchel Mouth" and proceed to triple-tongue a cornet at incredible speed.

Compared with these two, big, handsome Duke Ellington is an earnest, all-round musician. He learned to play the piano capably when he was growing up in Washington, D. C. At 16 he was playing with dance orchestras. In his early twenties he went to New York with a four-piece band of his own. Soon he was bettering the other Harlem jazzleaders by writing his own songs--'"Mood Indigo," "Lazy Rhap-sody," "Cotton Club Stomp," "Hot and Bothered." He has made his own arrangements of such straight tunes as "Limehouse Blues," "Three Little Words" and the Blackbirds score of 1928 ("I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby," "I Must Have That Man"), all of them unique for their variety of rhythm and the contrapuntal way in which the brasses play around the reeds.

Ellington's arrangements, apparently tossed off in the approved hot, spontaneous manner, have been carefully worked out at rehearsals beginning often at 3 a. m. after his theatre and night-club engagements, which gross as much as $250,000 a year. Ellington will sit at the piano, play a theme over, try a dozen different variations. Spidery Freddy Jenkins may see an ideal spot for a hot double-quick trumpet solo. Big William Brand may be seized with a desire to slap his double-bass, almost steal the percussion away from Drummer Sonny Greer. Duke Ellington lets all his players have their say but listens particularly to the shrewd advice of pale Cuban Juan Tizol, his valve trombonist.

Pianist Percy Grainger has likened the texture of Ellington's music to that of British Composer Frederick Delius. Scholarly musicians are looking forward to a Duke Ellington review which is scheduled for New York next season. Such lofty recognition has injected no jarring, self-conscious note into Ellington's performances. Ellington and his players cling to the Negro dialect. Hot obligates are still "riffs" to them. Dapper Sonny Greer, probably the world's greatest drummer, still shouts "Send me, man!" when he is about to launch a percussive volley. Ellington's own soft-spoken orders are a far cry from those used by white bandmasters. At rehearsals, where the routine request would be for a presto or an allegro con spirito, Ellington says. "Get off, now-- Sock it!" Where symphonic conductors would call for a solemn andante the hot jazz command is, "Come on, boys, go to church.''

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