Such Sweet Thunder - Duke Ellington (1957)
Duke Ellington’s music is kind of shorthand for “classy,” the kind of cultural norm that people only really deviate from when they’re poking fun at those norms.
He spent his long career advancing jazz as an artform, always seeking to make it something more than just “race music” as it was often called when he was young. As a composer, he balanced the freedom of his players with the needs of the piece. He often worked in high concepts and he often succeeded masterfully at executing them.
This is a suite of Shakespeare-inspired pieces (the title “such sweet thunder” is a line from Midsummer Night’s Dream). While it always sounds more like Ellington than like anything Shakespeare might have done, it’s “programmatic” in a classical sense: even if it’s not explicit in its meaning, you can feel the impression he’s trying to make on you.
It’s a slowly developing and lovely suite that I hadn’t listened to before today. It definitely left an impression.
