Welcome to The Duke Ellington
                            Society of Sweden (DESS)

The Profiles:
 
 Edward Kennedy
 "Duke" Ellington
 Composer, pianist,
 bandleader
 29 april 1899 ---
 24 maj 1974
 
We Love You Madly 



Teckning: Olle Snismarck

HOME

THE HISTORY OF DESS

DUKE ELLINGTON
IN SWEDEN

MEMBERS MEETINGS

MEMBERS

THE BULLETIN

THE BOARDING OF DESS

IN ENGLISH

LINKS

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 Copyright DESS
 Last modified
 14 maj 2009 
 duke@ellington.se
 

The aim of our society is to maintain and spread the knowledge of Duke Ellington, his life, his music and his musicians. We arrange regular meetings with high class live performances with music from the repertory of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The program of the meetings also include discussions, film shows etc.

We have a Bulletin also partly written in English where we produce articles, interviews and information received and collected from Dukish friends from all over the world. It is issued four times a year. Through our homepage, you can follow the activities of the Duke Ellington Society of Sweden.     

If you have the same admiration for Duke Ellington and his lifework please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you would like to become a member of Duke Ellington Society of Sweden.            

An easy way to become a member is to pay the member fee through Pay Pal’s money transfer service. Don’t forget to leave your name and address. You’ll then soon have the latest issue of our Bulletin and an invitation to our forthcoming member’s meetings.

Very Welcome – We love you madly

Alice Babs Jazz Award
to the jazz singer  Kristin Amparo

Foto: Jan Falk

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Johnny Hodges - The Composer
A catalog of 224 of his own compositions with examples of recordings.
 
Alternative Titles
Many of Duke Ellingtons melodies were renamed at one time or another. To bring order this compilation from The New Desor is helpful. It is here complimented with two-way listing to ease title search.

Bubber Miley discography
12 pages of detailed information about his recordings, with illustrative notes and comments from musicians.

Annual Ellington Conferences were held all around the world in the 1980´s and 90s. One took place in Copenhagen in 1992 and quite a few Swedes attended this Conference. Alone from the capital of Sweden, Stockholn, there were about10 delegates.This Danish Conference was a big success and it inspired the Swedes present to start planning a possible future Conference in Stockholm. Göran Wallén was the driving force and he found support from other delegates like Rolf Dahlgren, Alf Lavér, Olle Lindholm, Peter Lee and Bo Haufmann. They were carried on by a common feeling that Sweden meant something special to Duke Ellington: Many Swedes had played in his orchestra like the trumpetplayer Rolf Erikson, the trombonist Åke Persson, the singer Alice Babs och pianoplayer and composer  Nils Lindberg. Moreover Ellington had manifested his feelings about Sweden in the composition “Serenade to Sweden”etc.

A working committee consisting of a dozen enthusiasts,  was formed with the intention of arranging a Conference in Stockholm 1994. A  legal platform for the Conference  required  a registered association and therefore Duke Ellington Society of Sweden was established in 1993.Göran Wallén was elected chairman and did as such a great job as musical organizer and finding financial support among organisations and in the business world. 

“Rikskonserter”, arranging musical events nationwide, came into the picture and got its own representative in the wellknown jazz musician Lennart Åberg  who successfully offered his competence as  organizer in  Swedish music life as well as aquiring financial support from various cultural organizations. The Swedish Radio helpfully assisted in preparing for a concert at the Berwald Hall in connection  with the Conference.

The Conference took place in May 1994 och and was very well recieved. At a concert held at the Stockholm Concert Hall such Ellington alumni as Clark Terry, Louie Bellson, Willie Cook, Rolf Erikson, Joya Sherrill and of course Alice Babs took part –John Lewis also attended.

When the Conference was over it was decided that the Society, DESS, would live on. A news letter named “Bulletinen” would be published four times annually, running material on Duke Ellington, his life and  work.  Meetings would  also  be arranged four times a year, when lectures on Ellington would be given and Ellington music would be presented in live concerts. The concept has worked well och DESS has steadily attracted 200-250 members, spread all over Sweden with a certain concentration to the Stockholm area.

In 1999 DESS arranged a concert at the famous Stockholm ballroom “Nalen” to celebrate the centennial of the birth of Duke Ellington.In 2004 DESS with Göran Wallén as chairman took the iniative in a second Ellington Conference in Sweden, 10 years after the first. The Conference was held on the “Nalen” premises   

DESS continues its activities along  these lines, trying to preserve the memory of Duke Ellington, his music and his life.

 New members are most welcome to join!                                                               
                                                                            Bo Haufman
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Sven Eriksson, a member in the Duke Ellington Society of Sweden from its start and our former editor of the DESS Bulletin passed away on 13 October 2008. The members of the Board of DESS had a high appreciation of Sven – his knowledge, his integrity, his intense will and capability to work to give the  DESS Bulletin a professional form and his assistance to check that the technical equipment

was operational during the Ellington Conference in 2004 and during the SAMI meetings. Sven died at the age of 74 and he had last summer finished his work about  ”Johnny Hodges – The composer” with a compilation of Johnny Hodges own compositions with links to some of the recordings.

For the Board of DESS
Jan Falk, Chairman

"My People” was composed up front in a white Volvo Amazon Sport 1963

A three day job as Duke Ellington´s personal chauffeur during his tour of the Swedish Folkparks in 1963,turned into a monthlong tour around Sweden. Duke Ellington, then 64, and 21 year old Hans Löfgren from the capital of Stockholm, became good friends although the young driver from Stockholm hardly knew a word of English at the beginning of the trip. At the end of the stay in Sweden Duke asked Hans to come along to the USA and continue as his personal helper and driver.

But Hans didn´t dare to take the offer. He stayed in Sweden but met Duke and his orchestra each time they came to Sweden in all the coming years. He told the story of the greatest adventure of his life to the members of Duke Ellington Society of Sweden at a meeting on the first of October 2007.

The car was a white Volvo Amazon Sport and although the traffic in Sweden still honored left hand rule, the steering wheel was on the left side. Duke Ellington had the seat to the right beside the driver. The orchestra had about 30 concerts in one months time and the Folk parks (amusement parks with small tivolis and mostly an outdoor dancing floor) could be very far apart as the arrangers had to see to that they didn´t compete with each other and didn´t steal parts of the audiences from each other because of geographical and other circumstances.

Duke (and the orchestra which had a separate bus) therefore had to travel 300 kilometers or more almost every day with very little rest. The large orchestra was an expensive attraction for the Swedish Folkparks and had to attract big crowds.

But in spite of all the precautions and calculations things didn´t always come out right. In the town of Huskvarna in the middle of Sweden the orchestra only had an audience of 3oo people. This was in the evening of June 23, 1963. The night before the same amusement park had a public of about 6.000, but then the attraction was of a course a Swedish preacher, who draw crowds with his clowning, his rocking as well as his colourful preaching.

There was never any passengers allowed in the car except for three days when a lady called “The Contessa”, joined the company of Duke. Compare then with the orchestra bus: it had 18 musicians in the bus when it left Arlanda International Airport on the last of May, when the tour started.

When it was all over one month later there were still 18 musicians but also 24 females who had joined the gang for 3-4 days and then had been substituted with others.
- Although some of these relations led to marriage and children, I decided that I would never again let anyone else but the orchestra people travel on the tour bus in the future, Hans Löfgren says.

Duke himself didn´t seem to care. But at another time (June 18, 1963) he took a personal active part in getting the tenor sax player Paul Gonsalves to hospital in Gothenburg. Gonsalves had spent the night to-gether with the Swedish jazz critic and musician Carl-Erik Lindgren. Gonsalves had taken an overdose of drugs, and was completely knocked out. According to Duke, Gonsalves had had serious problems with drugs that he had overcome. It was now all in ruins. Lindgren was from then on and forever forbidden to come near any member of the orchestra och even forbidden to stay in the audiences during performances.

This was to be the rule for all coming years when Duke was in Sweden with the orchestra.
The many weeks that Gonsalves stayed at the Sahlgrenska hospital in Gothenburg were payed for by Duke Ellington himself.

- All during that month of 1963 that DE spent time in my car, he was writing music (notes or lyrics) except when looking out for traffic cops. The roads were not always very good in those days och there were lots of speed limits, except on Saturday and Sunday when you made your own decisions and drove as fast as you could. Which we did as we were always in a hurry to the next orchestra stand, Hans Löfgren remembers.

In the right seat in the white Volvo Amazon that month the show named “My People” was created, much of the church concerts and an innumerable amount of “loose pieces”. “My People” ,is as as the titel says, Duke´s homage to his own people, the race if you so want. In the small city of Borlänge in Dalecarlia, he wrote among other things “King fit the battle of Alabam” , dedicated to Martin Luther King and his fight for bettering the conditions of Afro-Americans. Where ever Ellington stayed, there was a piano in the hotel suite, as stipulated in his contract. Every night he called Billy Strayhorn in the US och demonstrated what he had composed. Some times he tested new things on me ( Löfgren) or wrote down the notes and distributed the manuscripts among the orchestra members the next day. Then they played as if they had tried it out many times before, but it was all absolutely new and performed for the first time.
“The greatest experience of my life. A miraculous new world opened up for me – and since than I´ve lived there.”

As told by Hans Löfgren to Bo Holmqvist, who wrote this summary.