In this year's Edinburgh Jazz Festival programme, one entry stood out as more ambitious and impressive than the rest: the Duke Ellington Sacred Concerts at Dunfermline Abbey last night and the Queen's Hall this evening, feature this year's incarnation of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus with Clark Tracey conducting.
Ellington's Sacred Concerts were a trio of concerts spread over the last decade of the life of the legendary composer, bandleader and pianist, who died in 1974, just six months after the final concert. A unique blend of gospel music, classical music, jazz, choral music and the blues filtered through the distinctive Ellington sound prism and written for a band that included many of the great "Ellingtonians", the Sacred Concerts were, for Duke, his "most important" work. When he was asked to present the first concert, at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral in 1965, he said: "Now I can say openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees."
For the past 20-odd years, the Sacred Concerts have also been an important part of the lives of Stan Tracey, the great British pianist and lifelong Ellington devotee, and his drummer son, Clark. And both generations of Traceys play key roles in these first-ever performances of this music in Scotland.
Back in 1990, Stan was invited to play Ellington's sacred music at a special concert to mark the 900th anniversary of Durham Cathedral. When he was given the music, he and Clark recognised the same arrangements he had played at an earlier Sacred Concert into which he'd been drafted at the last minute. What struck them was, says Clark, "the transcriptions hadn't been done right".
Father and son spent several days figuring out "a much closer approximation of the music" by listening to records of the original Ellington concerts. Clark recalls: "It was an arduous task but it was really enjoyable too – once you get to that level; the Ellington level. A lot of it was accurate but there were a lot of really poignant, squelchy Ellington moments – those very personal voicings – and it took a while to put your finger on how he'd done them."
Sadly illness has prevented Stan from taking his accustomed place at the piano for the Scottish dates, just as he was unable to appear at Glasgow Jazz Festival with Bobby Wellins at the end of June, so Steve Mellings, the pianist in Clark Tracey's Quintet and a regular associate of saxophonists Peter King and Alan Skidmore, has stepped into the role of the Duke.
Although the Tracey household had always been immersed in Ellington music, the Sacred Concert albums were less familiar than some of the other LPs.
"You don't just bung those records on, the way you could the others, so it's always been a very special event," says Clark. "I played on the first one Stan did, at Durham Cathedral, and we've since played it at all kinds of cathedrals. We did it at Yorkminster last year and that was immense. We had a 250-piece choir accompanying us."
This isn't a concert that's liable to get the spine tingling just once or twice: according to Clark, it's packed with electrifying moments. "The best bits are probably the fusion between the orchestra and the choir – when it's done correctly, the voice is obviously one of the most moving things in any band, so to get Ellington's voicings ... Two of the pieces are a cappella, and they're absolutely wondrous. I've seen grown men cry at them."
As in Yorkminster, the Sacred Concerts to Scotland have Clark in the conductor's role. "That's simply down to Stan wanting to put all his energy into just playing the piano and not having to concentrate on leaping up and conducting a band in at the right tempo. It's because I know this music inside out, and I'm going to hit the tempos bang where they should be that he's asked me. It's just taken a huge weight off my dad's mind, knowing that I'm going to be standing there instead of him."
Duke Ellington's Sacred Concert is at the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, tonight. Visit www.edinburghjazzfestival.com for info and tickets.
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