Tone Parallel

Issue 11 March 2024

Rainbow’s End Part Two

Duke Ellington at The Rainbow, 2 December, 1973 by Jill Furmanovsky

There is no shortage of eyewitness accounts from those who attended Duke Ellington’s final UK performance at The Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park 2 December 1973.

One member of the audience was journalist Chris Searle. Interviewing trombonist Art Baron, who was 23 years old during Ellington’s final European tour, Searle asked him for his memories of that particular tour. The trombonist replied:

“All those Rainbow and Odeon theatres and a performance for the Queen! People were so warm and happy to hear and meet us.

“They didn't think of my age and asked me questions what it was like playing with Duke in the ’30s and ’40s.

“Sometimes I soloed on In Duplicate, filling in for the great tenorist Paul Gonsalves. It was a very fast blues and as I found my stride someone in the band yelled out: ‘He never misses!’ — referring to Duke hiring another good one.

“We played a lot of classic tunes. Diminuendo in Blue really swung, Caravan, Take the ‘A’ Train, of course. Simple but great charts for the trombone section including In a Mellotone.

“It was a blast playing with lead trombone and unsung hero Vince Prudente and Chuck Connors on bass trombone.”

One comment Art Baron makes in the quotation above is particularly pertinent to the rainbow appearance: the trombone player had to fill in for tenor player Paul Gonsalves.

By the time of the Rainbow engagement, Paul had only just returned to the Orchestra, having missed earlier dates on the tour due to the increasing problem of his poor health.

Returning from the band’s trip to Africa the previous month, Gonsalves  was reported to have suffered a massive stroke while the band were between flights in Athens. As a consequence of this, he missed the Royal Variety Performance on 26 November, and his absence continued through to the two performances in Eastbourne from which the final Ellington album for RCA was drawn. It is all the more remarkable then that he took to the stage on 2 December for the performance in Finsbury Park.

Another member of the audience for that second house at The Rainbow was writer and critic Graham Colombé. A moth after Paul Gonsalves’ death in a  superb essay we shall return to shortly, Graham wrote,

“…anyone who saw (Gonsalves) at the Rainbow last year must have realised that the end was close.”

The end indeed came just days before Ellington’s own death some five months later in England on 14 May. From David Palmquist’s Duke Where And When website:

“Paul Gonsalves died in Finchley, a suburb of London, at age 53. The Associated Press reported he was found dead in bed. Jet Magazine reported he died of a heart attack, having gone to London to do small group work, and that his funeral was at St. Paul's Presbyterian Church, New York, presided over by Rev. John Gensel. The St. Petersburg Times reported he had gone to Holland to perform with Roy Egar's group and stopped in London on his way back to New York.

Ellington was not told of his death.”

As Mercer Ellington explained:

'...He had gone to play a few dates in Holland and then flew into London, with the money he had been paid, to see some old acquaintances. He died in one of their homes and his body was shipped home. I didn't tell Pop this, but in a few days they both – and Tyree Glenn, too – were lying in the same funeral home.'

The house in which Paul Gonsalves died was in fact owned by Jackie Sharpe, a musician himself and a facilitator of sorts for jazz musicians in London. The composition from the album of the same name, Boom-Jackie-Boom-Chick recorded ten years earlier. An intimate of Tubby Hayes, Sharpe himself played on the two albums Gonsalves and Hayes recorded together in the mid-sixties, Just Friends and Change of Setting.

Graham Colombé’s essay on Paul Gonsalves, Time and the Tenor Post Script: Paul Gonsalves 1920-74, was published a month after the saxophonist’s death in the magazine into jazz (pictured). The whole essay, available on-line here is well worth seeking out. I would like to quote just one paragraph in particular germane to the rainbow engagement:

“I feel that Happy Reunion from the English Concert double album represents Paul’s supreme performance on record and indeed ranks with the very greatest jazz recordings. Ranging from subdued murmurings to piercing shouts (which make Ellington’s vocal interjection a logical part of the performance), Paul draws on all his resources of technique, experience and feeling in a soul-baring creation which defines the very essence of jazz. It seems that all the most intense emotions life provided for him are recalled and focussed together in these four and a half minutes, so that it is hard to avoid the impression that this music is more the man than the man himself. How much more this reveals of the person inside than the handshake, the smile and the joke over a drink during an intermission. Jazz can be played behind a mask or a smokescreen and some of Paul’s own playing was fairly inscrutable, but here the masks are all peeled away and Paul plays himself, openly and without embarrassment.”

The composition Happy Reunion first appeared as a studio recording (and part of the ‘stock pile’) in June 1958, being performed subsequently at the Newport Jazz Festival that year and appearing as a studio recording on the Newport 1958 album.

The title was never more poignantly realised than in the 1970s. In addition to the recording cited here by Graham Colombé, there was a transcendent rendition at the University of Wisconsin Duke Ellington Festival in 1972 (discussed in a previous Tone Parallel) but perhaps the most heartrending performance of all was the one Paul gave at The Rainbow Theatre that winter’s night in 1973 at the conclusion of Ellington’s European tour.

This particular performance looms large in a third eyewitness account of the concert at Finsbury Park by British composer Mike Westbrook in a piece entitled Over The Rainbow that appeared in the March 2004 edition of Smith’s Academy Informal, the Mike Westbrook Band newsletter.

“The musician I most remember from that night is Paul Gonsalves,” Mike Westbrook wrote.

“Throughout much of the concert Gonsalves sat slumped in his chair at the end of the extra-long sax section, not playing. Well into the concert, in the middle of a fairly routine blues, sung by the girl singer, he rose to his feet and played a chorus. As he was nowhere near a microphone, not a note of his solo was audible…”

The incident, appropriately enough, is reminiscent of Paul famously blowing his legendary 27 choruses on Diminuendo In Blue and Crescendo and Blue into the Voice of America microphone rather than the Columbia Records microphone at Newport in 1956.

The “fairly routine blues” to which Mike Westbrook refers is Somebody Cares sung by Anita Moore and Toney Watkins.

We can hear that performance now, courtesy of a bootlegged tape. The audio is hardly hi-fi but it is possible to hear Paul’s solo behind the vocal…

Mike Westbrook continued:

“… The number ended. He sat down. A shock of disappointment, almost of grief, gripped the audience. Maybe Duke sensed this. Anyway, he went to the piano and started to play Happy Reunion.

“All attention was focused on the hunched figure of Gonsalves, one of the great tenor saxophonists, playing acoustically in that vast auditorium. He was still nowhere near a microphone. This was the solo we needed to hear. A blessing and, as it turned out, a valediction. We listened in profound silence, fearing to lose a single nuance of his playing. The rainbow held its breath. It’s possible that, outside, the London traffic paused in its tracks. It should have.”

Here is that performance, Happy Reunion with Paul Gonsalves. Listen carefully and you may indeed catch a rainbow holding its breath…

The final Tone Parallel will be published next Friday, 22 March.