Track Listing

1. Praise God
2. Supreme Being
3. Heaven
4. Something 'Bout Believing
5. Almighty God
6. Shepherd (Who Watches over the Flock)
7. It's Freedom
8. Meditation
9. Biggest and Busiest Intersection
10. T.G.T.T. (Too Good to Title)
11. Praise God and Dance

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111661 in Music
• Brand: Prestige
• Released on: 1990-07-09
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Live
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

Customer Reviews

The Ellington Spirit Incarnate
This is not only the best of the three Ellington Sacred Concerts but, with Alice Babs on hand, it's one of the best performances of that Concert.

Critics and Ellington "purists" will tell you the Sacred Concerts are inferior Ellington. I beg to disagree. It's true that much of the music, such as the tuneful "Something About Believing," is accessible to the point of being mainstream pop. Duke was playing to a whole new audience and moreover using local choirs that had to learn the music on the fly. But listen to the orchestrations--the inimitable sound of the Ellington reed section--as well as the solo pieces and performances.

Take the ingenious, artful little number, "Heaven." Duke was no visionary like Coltrane: he was a genial, generous-hearted human being with an insatiable appetite for life and the things of this resplendent world. "Heaven" is another "Sophisticated Lady." It will strike some listeners as being "inappropriate" and insufficiently "spiritual." To my ears the piece is a hymn of thanksgiving by an artist who relished and was grateful for every moment of his existence--the sensuous as well as the spiritual.

The Second Sacred Concert is Ellington writing about what he knows and in the process reflecting the substance and style of what had gone before. It's characteristic Ellington, which in my book is music at its best.

Un Concert Spirituel maudit
What do you want? I can't pan it. Nor can I treat it as a Masterpiece of Duke's "Late Period". I really do believe that at least some people have something at stake with proving that Duke's last works are a culmination a la Beethoven. If he's really gonna be "America's Greatest Composer" (an insufficiently thought - out notion, at best), he's gotta have a great Late Period! But, OK, if you're gonna throw down like this, then the Second Sacred Concert should be able to hold its own next to Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles, the Verdi Requiem...like that. And this is absurd. But what to do with music like this? Schuller, Crouch, Mark Tucker and all the other great masters of exegesis have tried to make sense of what became of Duke's compositional mission in the later '60's - '70's.
So all I can do is try to say what works for me - and what doesn't.
What does - unequivocably: 1) Praise God. The tonal majesty of Harry Carney. Not much more to say. The tugging - at - the - heartstrings harmony. A rare Ducal use of contrary motion. Signifiers of both majesty and religiosity (the bowed bass, the trombones...). A vignette, but a really touching one.
2) The Shepherd (Who Watches Over The Night Flock). One of Duke's best later Cootie features. I knew Father Gensel, and I have to say, I hear the Night Flock in this portrait, but I don't particularly hear The Shepherd. But Cootie worries the melodies and the figures in such an exquisitely painful, drawn - out way. There are some even stronger live performances around, but this one is great. And when Cootie makes some references to his favorite '30's phrases (particularly from Echoes of Harlem), it is chilling to hear 30 years fall away, and one could be reminded of Yeats:
"An old man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick
Unless soul clap hands and sing and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress."
3) Meditation - 3 Minutes of pure magic. Ellington's piano playing really came into its own in the '60's and attained the level of genius. We really first see this in the late '40's (Clothed Woman), but it just gets better and better. Here we hear some figurations that belong to late - Victorian songs of the 1890's counterpoised with moments of '60's Modal Jazz, and the whole subsumed into a purely Ellingtonian, totally personal harmonic and gestural language. I wish he could've found a way to write like this for the band.
4) T.G.T.T. - the culmination of over forty years of thinking about the wordless voice (Duke uses instruments to aspire to the condition of voices, and voices to aspire to the condition of instruments), from Creole Love Call to Transbluency to here. And Alice Babs is a virtuoso, although I have to admit I find her even more intriguing on the less-totally-successful Almighty God...which leads me to...
What Works - Intermittently: 1) Almighty God. It's like an Ellington Late Period St. James Infirmary. Which impression is confirmed by Russell Procope's woody, New Orleans-y clarinet. Alice Babs trying to be bluesy is touching and piquant. The chorus is wooden in another way. As is the shuffle drumming. But it's all so Duke - you have to love it.
2) It's Freedom - a disaster, except for the stride - y moments and the glimpses of Hodges. But these are precious.
3) The Busiest And Biggest Intersection. The beginning shows us what Duke's late writing could've been had he focused on it in a more courageous way. Thrilling rapid changes of texture. Something very new. Unfortunately, this section only takes up the first minute of this four-minute track. The rest is indifferent and badly played.

The rest? Something About Believing's lyrics are so painfully bad that they are precious to me. I love special badness, but it hurts, too.
Praise God And Dance is a rousing ending, as far as it goes. The ensemble writing and playing are pretty frayed. Chorus hectors rather than inspires.First Gonsalves and then Cat grooving at the end - a la Diminuendo and Crescendo In Blue, as one might expect.Thrilling Hodges and Buster Cooper earlier on.
They took out the worst track - Don't Get Down On Your Knees - for this reissue.I'm sorry for this.That was epic badness.
The final analysis? What is attempted here is only rarely achieved. But the attempt still gives me chills. As does my sense of regret that, for all Ellington's genius, he really couldn't pull off many of the things he attempted. What cruelty and hubris it is for we lesser mortals to think that we can judge this. And yet how annoyingly self-congratulatory the posthumous hyperbole reads (Gary Giddins, are you listening?).

Great Jazz, Great Spirit
As a Christian and an Ellingtonite, I looked forward to this CD with great anticipation. As usual with the Duke, I was not disappointed. The CD combination of great Jazz and Gospel music and thought provoking lyrics raises one's soul. The first play may initially take you by surprise, but by the end you will realize that you have just experienced another Ellington classic.