Mood indigo

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mood Indigo is a jazz standard composed by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard . Mitchell Parish wrote the text .

History of the song

The song is in the form ABA, where B is a variation of A. The main theme was supplied by Bigard , who had learned it from his clarinet teacher Lorenzo Tio , who dubbed it Mexican Blues for a radio show in October 1930 .

Ellington's distinctive arrangement was first recorded by his Cotton Club Orchestra for Brunswick Records (catalog # 01068) on October 17, 1930. The recordings include Arthur Whetsol (trumpet), Joe Nanton (trombone), Barney Bigard (clarinet), Duke Ellington (piano), Fred Guy (banjo), Wellman Braud (bass) and Sonny Greer (drums). What was unusual about this recording was that Ellington used the muted trumpet, muted trombone, and clarinet to achieve a consistent sound.

The piece was recorded in October 1930 as part of a radio production by Ellington's orchestra and dubbed Dreamy Blues . "It was the first song I wrote specifically for a microphone broadcast," Ellington recalled. " In the next few days, mountains of mail came, it was a huge success for this new piece, and Irving Mills wrote a text for it ". It was renamed Mood Indigo and ultimately a jazz standard. It was not until 1940 that Ellington recorded the vocal version with Ivie Anderson .

What makes the song interesting is the fact that Ellington turned the traditional timbres of the wind instruments upside down: the normal pitch order would be the clarinet in the high register, the trumpet in the middle, and the trombone in the low register. The order was reversed in Mood Indigo. At that time this instrumentation was not in use. The overtones of the clarinet and trombone generated an additional microphone tone ( mike tone ) in the studio . The acoustic illusion creates the impression of another voice, a fourth instrument. This acoustic effect was used repeatedly by Ellington in Solitude (1932), Dusk (1940) and other pieces. Mood Indigo has become one of the major works of the Ellington Orchestra over the years.

The Ellington biographer James Lincoln Collier describes it as an atypical composition for Ellington, as this tended to be " a rather moving composer "; “ He uses a lot of polyphonic, heavy and often dissonant harmonies and a lot of contrast. Mood Indigo is practically stillness itself. It contains no polyphony; the harmonies are mostly simple and there is minimal contrast between the parts. It moves slowly, with the furtiveness of a sunset, and is suddenly gone. "

The piece has been recorded many times by other artists, including Paul Robeson , Ella Fitzgerald , Nina Simone , Nat King Cole , Frank Sinatra , Louis Armstrong , the Boswell Sisters , Charles Mingus , Red Nichols , Kid Ory , Johnny Hodges , the Clarinet Quartet Cl-4 , Albert Mangelsdorff and Jimmy Rowles ( Plays Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn , 1981).

Chart successes

Ellington's recording with his Cotton Club Orchestra was in the charts for 10 weeks in 1931 and made it to number 3. The next year, Jimmie Lunceford reached number 19 with his orchestra. Norman Petty put the song in the pop charts in 1954 (# 14); the Four Freshmen reached place 24 in the same year.

Copyright dispute

It was not until 1987 that the lyricist Mitchell Parish, now 87 years old, claimed that he wrote the text for Mood Indigo alone. Until then, the composers were Albany Leon Bigard (aka Barney Bigard), Duke Ellington and Irving Mills. Parish has been asked by professional writers to finish some unfinished compositions since 1929 and is therefore considered the most famous phantom lyricist of the time. It is said of Mills himself that he had only a small vocabulary available, so that he was probably helped out at Mood Indigo. In any case, Parish did not receive any royalties for this until his death in 1993 ; he was merely on the payroll of the music publisher Mills Music.

literature

James Lincoln Collier: Duke Ellington . Ullstein, Berlin, 1999 ISBN 3-548-35839-X .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mark Tucker: "The Duke Ellington Reader" (Google Book)
  2. ↑ Mitchell Parish was then employed by the music publisher Irving Mills. In older works of jazz literature, such as Carlo Bohländer's Reclams Jazzführer , Irving Mills is named as a text author. Mills Musikverlag was the copyright holder.
  3. ^ According to Collier, the band of the New Orleans musician Armand J. Piron played Tio's composition under the title "Dreamy Blues" as a signature melody; Al Rose, cit. after Collier p. 212.
  4. ↑ Ellington biographer Collier relates that Duke Ellington claimed that he still needed a number for a recording session that Irving Mills had scheduled for a sextet, and that he therefore wrote the piece the day before. But Barney Bigard always maintained that he had written most of it and sued Ellington; his name was eventually added, and from then on he also received royalties. Bigard later said, “ We didn't think much of it (at first) and all of a sudden it started to get popular and that was it. Twenty-eight years I've missed the royalties. I didn't get a cent of it. It was all under Ellington and Mills' names. “See Collier, p. 211.
  5. ↑ cit. after Collier, p. 211.
  6. ↑ ASCAP Hit Songs, 1977, p. 31
  7. ^ Cary Ginell, Music ... and then Words Part 1: Mitchell Parish - The Phantom Lyricist
  8. ↑ Mark Tucker: "The Duke Ellington Reader" (Google Book, p. 340)

Web links