The February 19 & 26 issue of the magazine is so good it’s in danger of exploding.
Unrelated, yet essentially the same:
Ellington was appalled by the very thought that jazz might “develop” to the point where people could no longer dance to it. When he said “jitterbugs are always above you,” he wasn’t really complaining. They might have kept him awake, but he wanted them to be there. He was recalling the sights and sounds of New York life that he got into “Harlem Airshaft,” one of his three-minute symphonies from the early 1940s. If he had put the sounds in literally, one of his most richly textured numbers would have been just a piece of Âliteral-Âminded program music like Strauss’ Sinfonia Domestica. But Ellington put them in creatively, as a concrete transference from his power of noticing to his power of imagining. Ellington was always a noticer, and in the early 1940s, he had already noticed what was happening to the Âart form that he had helped to invent. He put his doubts and fears into a single funny line. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Characteristically, he set the line to music, and it swung superbly. But under the exultation, there is foreboding. Ellington could see the writing on the wall, in musical notation. His seemingly flippant remark goes to the heart of a long crisis in the arts in the 20th century, and whether or not the crisis was a birth pang is still in dispute.
—Clive James, “The Astonishing Duke Ellington,” Slate
Obvious caption for this week’s contest: “I don’t care if she is the recently sawed cross-section of a tree. I love her.”