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oneweekoneband:

Duke Ellington & His Orchestra, “Sophisticated Lady”
(Ellington-Hardwick-Brown-Mills)
Columbia CB-591 · Feb 15, 1933

And with this composition, we have left the pep and urgency of the Twenties far behind, and are now luxuriating in the cool, dreamy Thirties. I often think of this period in jazz as being analogous to the Buckingham-Nicks Fleetwood Mac: it uses the musical vocabulary of the hot, urgent music of the previous decade (here jazz, there rock), but it’s more concerned with precisely capturing a mood, often elegaic or painful, than with breaking the world apart and making it new. This is music for grownups, articulating the ambiguous and complicated emotional terrain of adulthood, where easy answers are found everywhere but within your own heart.

I am speaking, of course, of the instrumental version of “Sophisticated Lady” — the lyrics, credited to Mills but apparently written by Mitchell Parish of “Stardust” fame, turn the ambiguity into mockery, and the complexity into a cartoon. Even Ellington, who never said a bad word about anyone else in public, allowed that they were “not entirely fitted to my original conception.” (If you must hear them anyway, and I understand, I was once like you, try the Boswell Sisters’ version.) The instrumental is so sensitively written and — here — performed, that with the title to set the scene, you can practically see the lady. Heartbreak she’s known, sure — she’s lived, hasn’t she? — but there’s also steel under her furs, and if she allows herself to drown her sorrows, she takes infinite pains to be polite about it. Above all the music makes no judgments; it luxuriates in her beauty and pose. People do what they must, and satire is just the other side of sentimentality.

But this record is also an excellent argument for listening to the original 78 recordings of this music. Because “Sophisticated Lady” has become so deeply embedded into American culture in the nearly eighty years since it was written — it’s heard in movies to indicate swankiness, it’s heard in commercials to imply elegance, it’s heard in ritzy hotel lobbies to assure you that you’re getting your money’s worth — it can be difficult to hear it in bland high-fidelity without just shrugging it off as easy listening: disposable prettiness, a simulacrum of sophistication that leaves the emotions alone and ensures you never have to feel anything. But listen to it against the crackle of surface noise, with Johnny Hodges’ alto wavering due to distortions in the disc, and you can hear it properly, maybe for the first time, as a combination lament and celebration; when every note seems to have to fight for its life through the encrustation of time to reach you, it means more.