Footnote to a Bagatelle

 So, I’ve been listening to the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and I realize that the new sound the budgie makes at times, is an imitation of a trumpet squeal. It’s all good.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Agent 99: Max, you realize you’ll be facing every kind of danger imaginable.

Agent 86: And loving it!

Meseems I have been remiss, in that I have as yet horribly underreported the origins of Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be. Let’s address that nearly impious lacuna. The seed was the inclusion, by my friends Peter Bloom and John Funkhouser, in their ebullient Ellington program, of Mercer Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” a number which Duke had his son write in 1941 during a strike against ASCAP, during which Duke’s music could not air on radio. If I remember Peter’s remarks correctly, the number became the signature tune of a weekly jazz program on a Baltimore radio station. I made a mental note that I wanted to use Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be as a title.

Methought also of Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy,” a short number (the first composition of Monk’s to be copyrighted, on 2 June 1941) which that jazz Master used as a kind of theme song. Wikipedia notes that [T]he tune appears on almost every single live album by Monk, as it was the closing tune of each set from Monk’s days at Minton’s Playhouse onwards. Gentle Reader, we note in passing the coincidence of both “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, and “Epistrophy” being conceived in 1941. So here I am, a composer who enjoys the great gift (thanks to the good grace of talented, generous colleagues) of leading an Ensemble with my name on it, and the notion of writing a short sort of signature tune caught my fancy. Thus was born Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be. I refrain from suggesting that this is all to be said of the matter, given my history of posting before I may have assembled all the facts. But these are the core facts.

So why do I post this today? Yesterday I wrote of sending piano and cello music to Yun Lee for her and her bassist husband Randy Zigler, and soon after I realized that Nostalgia Ain’t should reduce reasonably well for piano and bass, and this did I send today.