Duke Ellington / Maurice Béjart: Such Sweet Thunder (1960)

Benne Vischer, an old friend of Otto Flückiger, was so nice as to digitize dozens of VHS cassettes from the Otto Flückiger collection and send me a harddisk full of material – on which I found a rare and beautiful document today:

In 1960 Joachim-Ernst Berendt had heard Duke Ellington’s LP “Such Sweet Thunder”, a musical interpretation of William Shakespeare’s works – and tried – succesfully – to convince famous choreographer Maurice Béjart that the music would be ideal for being staged as a ballet.

From 1955 to 1974 Berendt several times a year presented jazz and related music in his series of “Jazz gehört und gesehen” (Jazz heard and seen) TV broadcasts for station Südwestfunk (go here for a complete list of broadcasts, I wish Südwestfunk would start to produce DVDs!). And Béjart’s interpretation was staged in the studios of Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden to be broadcasted in this series. It was brought to the public on September 12, 1960 and it was rebroadcasted at some time in the nineties, when Otto probably recorded it on VHS.

 Enjoy!

Big Bob Dougherty

The sleeve of the above LP (Golden Crest LP CRSP 1000) carries what was supposed to be the only known photograph of Leavenworth KS R’n'B saxophonist Big Bob Dougherty, who was active in Leavenworth and Kansas City in the fifties and early sixties. Not much was known about Big Bob’s career after he had a small hit with “Big Bob’s Boogie” on Decca in 1952.

Last autumn though I went down to the Otto Flückiger archives where i found a file containing several letters from Otto to Big Bob and vice versa and some gorgeous photographs. This and some old newspaper clippings allowed me to write the “Big Bob Dougherty Story”. Unfortunately I cannot tell much more now, since I have to wait until Big Bob’s story will be published in “Blues & Rhythm” magazine sometime in summer 2011. Sometime after that, I will put the whole story up on the web. But to give you a little taste, here’s Big Bob playing and singing “Hot Foot” in 1959 or 1960, a track also featured on the above LP.

Hot Foot

Not Valaida Snow!

If you are looking for photos of trumpeter/singer Valaida Snow on the internet, you will find the above photo on several websites. It is indeed a beautiful photograph – but it does not show Valaida Snow. In fact this is Lorraine Glover, wife of famous hardbop trumpet player Donald Byrd. And it was shot by William Claxton in 1960. There are several books of Claxton’s work in which this photo is featured (usually just credited “Mrs. Donald Byrd”). The websites on which this photo is credited as showing Valaida snow can’t either be reached or ignore my postings about this, so maybe this helps.